Recently I moved my personal projects to Fossil. The move has been fun and interesting!
I'm newer to Fossil and so far for my reasonably simple use cases the cli + built in website have been an easy to work with combination.
But I miss Fork - a fast and friendly git client for Mac and Windows...
What I miss:
- Quick view of changed and added files powered by a file watcher so the view is mostly-almost-always up to date
- Quick view of file diffs
- Fast mouse-driven selection of files to take actions on - I often want to group a few files into a commit and I find clicking a GUI list of files is faster and easier than using the terminal
- Dedicated Window - when something is important, like version control, it can be nice to have a dedicated window/app
So with a distinct lack of Fossil tooling out in the world I thought it would be fun to write my own helper program! Goals:
- Fossil has a nice command line interface - try to work with it rather than hide it
- Be careful about duplicating views and features already in Fossil's web interface
- Target frequent operations - I suspect that there is no real time savings over the cli for commands that you run infrequently
After about 4 weeks of personal time effort this is what Pointless Fossil - a Fossil SCM Windows Gui Helper looks like:
It is very new but I'm actively using and enjoying it. This is very much a work in progress - not enough time to develop any interesting insights - but a few details that might be of interest are below.
Avalonia UI
Avalonia UI is one of several interesting cross-platform options for building desktop applications with .NET. Pointless Fossil is already the largest program I have ever built with Avalonia and overall it has been a positive experience. It seems to me that vs WPF you gain cross-platform potential and occasional syntax/framework improvements - you lose the large body of online help, there are fewer packages/less code available and there is not a great embedded web view.
Fossil JSON API
Fossil has a JSON API that allows you to retrieve information about the state of a repository - VERY useful!! But in the official binaries the json api is not available... To access the JSON API you will have to compile a custom version of Fossil - there is good documentation available, but this was an unexpected todo on the way to getting a working program!
Reading Standard Output
A requirement for the program was allowing the user to respond if Fossil asked a question on the command line. I hadn't written a similar feature before and I assumed that writing to stdin was going to be the messy part. It turned out that stdin wasn't the problem - many of the questions Fossil asks don't end with a new line and I was surprised by the code needed to read stdout in characters rather than lines! GitHub Copilot was very helpful in working out the details - the start of my code is below, I still can't help but wonder if there is a better/simpler way...
var buffer = new byte[1024];
var charBuffer = new char[1024];
var decoder = Encoding.UTF8.GetDecoder();
int bytesRead;
while ((bytesRead = await reader.BaseStream.ReadAsync(buffer, 0, buffer.Length)) > 0)
{
var charsDecoded = decoder.GetChars(buffer, 0, bytesRead, charBuffer, 0);
for (var i = 0; i < charsDecoded; i++)
DiffPlex
DiffPlex is Netstandard 1.0+ C# library to generate textual diffs - in addition to the core functionality WinUI, WPF, WinForms and Avalonia (via BAndysc's DiffPlex.Avalonia) controls are available. This MIT licensed library is definitely worth being aware of!
