Overlap - another perspective into your git history?
Hi!
Although the recent trend seems to be to announce a groundbreaking new git client and no less, with which we at syntevo can't really keep up as we're still developing exactly one, we think there's still some other interesting things around git.
One thing we recently added to SmartGit is what we call the Overlap column. It's a bit weird to explain, since it doesn't have an exact counterpart in git itself, and as far as we know no other git client shows this information either (please correct me if I'm wrong, it would be very interesting to see what others have come up with!).
In essence, we tried to make visible what git doesn't track or display on its own, namely the relationship between changes introduced by commits in your branch.
Sounds a bit abstract, but this new column shows you at a glance which commits have overlap with one or more selected commits.
An example: Suppose you have a bunch of commits. The last one introduces a few changes, but you're not sure whether these changes should be made somewhere else in your branch, or if they are undoing what you did earlier.
What I've been doing in this case was to go into the file logs to find the relevant commits, and inspect them, one file at a time. That works well, and is quite fast thanks to git being quick, but it's also a bit cumbersome, especially with many files. So instead of doing that, I sometimes resorted to combing through the log itself, which can be tedious as well. With Overlap, you just select that last commit, and the commits which have some Overlap with that selected commit are highlighted.
Having built that feature (and all the other stuff around history re-ordering, splitting, modifying which goes hand-in-hand with Overlap), we are living inside a bubble of course. So I wonder, what does r/git think about this? Do you think this is useful? Is it just another gimmick you won't use? Does AI make it irrelevant anyway since you don't read code anymore, anyhow?
Let us know what you think!
https://docs.syntevo.com/SmartGit/Latest/Manual/GUI/Overlap