Smart, Git and Easy

 Here’s a great program that my friend Andy from openSUSE turned me on to that makes handling Git that much easier than typing at the CLI (Command Line Interface). Many Linux users are already familiar with Git, but for those who aren’t, Git is a nice revision control sharing system. A host is used as an interface for the commands and in a similar fashion as Google Drive or Dropbox, files are moved in and out. Git provides timestamps to each file as it is accessed, or in Gits case pushed into the host or pulled from the host. This file sharing method makes collaborating on a single file or a multitude of files that much easier to track so everyone involved with the file can tell which file was updated last so there is no confusion. At least this is my jist of Git.

 SmartGit is a really nice GUI for taking place of doing Git commands from the terminal line. I grew up in the pre-GUI age long before Windows was invented and spent years and years working from the command line. To be honest, if I never had to use one again would be ok with me, but as most Linux distros and programmers have not fully reached a point of escape from command line operations, sometimes we need to go there. Thankfully there are programmers who think like I do and work their magic on projects like SmartGit to eliminate some of the old CLI usage.

 I would have preferred SmartGit to be a little easier to get setup, but a couple of good articles via Google search and it can be done fairly easy. It downloads as a tar file but doesn’t get extracted and installed the same way most would. Instead, the files simply get extracted and then some modifications have to be made. If it weren’t for the fact that this software came highly recommended by someone I trust, I might have looked for an easier alternative or gave in and went by command line, but I kind of like a challenge anyway.

The first thing to note is that this GUI is dependent on the Java Runtime Environment, so make sure it is installed on your computer or at least have the file available. We are going to have to know the path to the file and paste it into one of the SmartGit files so it knows where to get it from.

This is the file we will need to open with our text editor and put in the path to our JRE.

Next, with text editor of choice, insert the path location into the file and save it. It should look like this.

Now all we have to do is run it and then add a launcher so we don’t have to initialize from the command line all the time. Open a terminal session and switch to the directory where SmartGit has been extracted then initialize it like a C++ program (or similar) like this.

If for any reason SmartGit does not initialize, go back and make sure the path to the JRE is correct and all terminal entries are correct. If all went well then we should be looking at the SmartGit start screen. To install the quick launcher just repeat the steps in the terminal but this time use the add-menuitem.sh file and it will put an icon on the desktop for you.

On the initial start up, there will be an option for where the Git account to associate with is located. This is something that will either be already set up or will need to be. The rest is to just select all the default values given. Once all that is done, then just work your way around the interface and relax because all those typing lines just became simple mouse clicks. Fast, fun and easy just the way we like it. : ) 

REMEMBER: Git is best used for programming files when revision control is really important. It CAN be used as a replacement for Google Drive or Dropbox, but it’s not recommended and even the GitHub website states that it is NOT intended to be used in the same capacity, hence the reason they only allocate 1G to each account for free.