Even though Eclipse ships with a comprehensive Git tool, it seems that for certain tasks many developers switch to the command line. Because of that, Frank and I started to fill this gap a few weeks ago.

If you are interested in what happened during this time you may want to read these posts: git init gonsole, eclipse egit integration, content assist for git commands, oops – it’s a framework and multiple console sessions.

This weeks update brings usage hints for commands, a command history, an Open Console contribution for the EGit Team menu and a small enhancement for the use command. If you want to try the new features by yourself, you can install the tool from this update site: https://rherrmann.github.io/gonsole/repository/

Command Usage Hints

The content assist now gives you usage hints for the selected proposal.

History

Finally the long promised command history is there:

To bring up the history popup, you can use the same key as in the Unix shell: Arrow Up. As with the content assist, the entries are filtered. Text that you have already typed or type while the popup is open will filter the entries that are shown.

Use Command Enhancement

With the use command it is now possible to switch to a repository that is not known to your IDE. If you enter the command followed by the absolute path to the .git directory of a repository, Gonsole will switch to this repository.

EGit Team Menu

If Gonsole is installed, the EGit Team menu shows an Open Console entry. If you select it, a console session will be opened for the repository that the selected resource belongs to.

Conclusion

While we had much fun over the last weeks we were also able to learn a few things from experiementing with new programming techniques. In particular, the nested TDD approach has worked out very well for us. This was also our first encounter with Travis – that we found very pleasant. It provides a lean CI build infrastructure and integrates well with GitHub.

But we will take a break for now from working on Gonsole as we have to attend to other duties. In the meanwhile, we gather feature requests that might surface and see what can be achieved with the next version.

Yours Sincerely, …

Rüdiger & Frank