We want it bad. Reeeeeal bad.

Bonanzle is still running on Subversion (via Tortoise), because comparing its UI to the UI for the de facto git standard (msysgit) is like comparing Rails to ASP on Visual Basic. Yes, the difference is that big. Msysgit is ugly as Pauly Shore, most of its windows can’t be resized, it crashes regularly, and trying to decipher the intent of its UI is like reading dead sea scrolls.

Yes, yes, I know: if you don’t like a piece of open source software, you should shut up and fix it. Unfortunately, I’m sort of single-handedly maintaining this web site that has grown to about 150k uniques this month, where two months ago we had about 10k uniques. I can not end world hunger and rescue my cat stuck in a tree.

But if there is any intelligent life out there that has spare programming cycles and the desire to make a huge difference in the world, this is my personal plea that they will consider giving some love to the woebegone msysgit… or maybe just start their own Windows git client, I can’t imagine a real hacker would take more than a week or two to match the featureset of the existing msysgit.

I’d really like to move Savage Beast to github, and I’d really like to collaborate on the other projects that are happening on there, but it just doesn’t make sense to go from a slick, error free, decipherable UI like Tortoise to the meager helpings of msysgit.

I’d happily donate to a project like better Windows git.

Preemptive note to smart alecks: No, I’m not moving to Mac (or Linux) now. There are plenty of reasons why, I’ll tell you all about it some other time. Incidentally, what is the preeminent GUI for git on Mac these days? From what I understand, many of the real hackers are perfectly content using git from the command line…? Shudder to think of reading the diffs and histories.