While Eclipse ships with a comprehensive Git tool, it seems that for certain tasks many developers switch to the command line. This gave Frank and me the idea, to start an open source project to provide a git console integration for the IDE. What happened so far during the gonsole weeks can be read in git init gonsole and eclipse egit integration.

The recent days we have been working on content assist and made the appearance more colorful. The color settings aren’t yet configurable so that you’d have to live with what we found appropriate ;-)

Furthermore we have basic content assist in place. In its current state, it helps you with finding the right git commands. If you type ‘s’ followed by Ctrl+Space for example, it will show you that there is a show, a show-ref, and a status command.

While the feature itself might not look very impressive, it provides the basis for more content assists. Showing the documentation for a selected command isn’t far away. The same accounts for completion proposals for command arguments like branches and repositories, which might look like this:

The content assist code was written only backed by end-to-end tests, which turned out to be a quite effective way to work exploratively. Now we will re-construct the functionality test driven while the end-to-end tests ensure that we do not break the overall features.

In the meanwhile you may want to try the software by yourself and install it from this update site: https://rherrmann.github.io/gonsole/repository/

That’s it for now, let’s get back to TDD. And maybe the next time we can show you more content assist features…