Sony Arouje

Recently GitHub launched a new Github client for windows. The moment I heard the news I installed the client to give a try. I could say the new Github for windows is really awesome and easy to use. See the screen shot of the client.

The important feature is, the moment you sign in with Windows client it creates a security token and updates it in Github. With the previous client it’s a headache, I screwed up the setup procedures so many times. To setup Git GUI run the command utility to create the security token, then manually update the key in you Github account, add your repo path, the procedures goes on….. In windows Client, it’s as simple as just login with your Github account and the client takes care of every thing else.

Once you logged in, click on the Github User Name and the client will show all your Github repositories. You can easily clone any repository to local by just clicking on the clone icon that will appear in mouse hover as shown below.

Before cloning make sure you update the Default storage directory. You can find the location under Tools and Options –> Options as shown below

The options menu brings up the below screen where you can update the settings

Update your default storage directory and click Update button, we are done with the settings. Let’s clone your repository, I already clone Neo4jD repo. Let’s see how to deal with commit and push actions using Windows client.

You can find all your cloned repo under local repositories. For demo I made a small change in the unit test. To perform the commit action in Windows Client, click on the arrow that shows next to your repo name as shown below

Will take you to the repo page where you can see all your changes and history as shown below. Left side display all the files to be commited and right side shows the commit comment and commit history.

If you want to see what changed in the source, click the arrow button next to changed file (marked in red rectangle above). You can see the changes just below it as shown below.

You can even discard the changes from commit by right clicking on the item and select Discard Changes from the context menu.

It’s the time to commit the changes, enter the commit comment in Commit Message text box displayed on the right hand side and click Commit button. See the below screen shot

Clicking on the History item will show the changes as part of that commit. Let’s see the history of the commit I made yesterday. You can see all the files modified as part of that commit and can see the changes by clicking the down arrow next the each item.

Another feature added to GitHub web is an addition of a button called ‘Clone in Windows’ as shown below. This helps to clone any repo directly from GitHub, and it uses the installed GitHub for Windows client to full fill the cloning.

I can say GitHub for Windows is a very user friendly client and I don’t think I will go back to GitGUI again.