From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: Paul Mackerras Subject: gitk with hyperspace support Date: Wed, 17 Aug 2005 10:21:04 +1000 Message-ID: <17154.33520.584666.701545@cargo.ozlabs.ibm.com> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-From: git-owner@vger.kernel.org Wed Aug 17 02:21:41 2005 Return-path: Received: from vger.kernel.org ([209.132.176.167]) by ciao.gmane.org with esmtp (Exim 4.43) id 1E5BgC-0007BW-6r for gcvg-git@gmane.org; Wed, 17 Aug 2005 02:21:16 +0200 Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S1750770AbVHQAVN (ORCPT ); Tue, 16 Aug 2005 20:21:13 -0400 Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org id S1750771AbVHQAVN (ORCPT ); Tue, 16 Aug 2005 20:21:13 -0400 Received: from ozlabs.org ([203.10.76.45]:13205 "EHLO ozlabs.org") by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S1750770AbVHQAVN (ORCPT ); Tue, 16 Aug 2005 20:21:13 -0400 Received: by ozlabs.org (Postfix, from userid 1003) id 4BD8567F73; Wed, 17 Aug 2005 10:21:12 +1000 (EST) To: git@vger.kernel.org X-Mailer: VM 7.19 under Emacs 21.4.1 Sender: git-owner@vger.kernel.org Precedence: bulk X-Mailing-List: git@vger.kernel.org I have been trying a new approach to drawing the commit graph in gitk. This involves sending a lot of the really long lines into "hyperspace", by terminating them with an arrow pointing down when the graph gets too wide, and then reintroducing them later with an arrow pointing up, as though they had used a warp drive to dive beneath the screen (into the mysterious 3rd dimension :) and then reappear later. The result is that the graph stays at a reasonable width and doesn't need to be compressed. My reasoning is that it is the local short-range connections which are interesting and informative. The long-range connections aren't really visually informative; if you want to know about the long-range connections, the parent and child lists in the details pane are much more useful. I would like to get some feedback about what people think of the visual effect of this new approach, and in particular whether having the lines jump into hyperspace loses information that people find useful. The new version is at: http://ozlabs.org/~paulus/gitk/gitk.hs If the reaction is positive I'll check this into my gitk.git repository. Thanks, Paul.