Programming, Life-style, Random

Installing Git Cola on OSX

There are tons of Git GUIs out there, ready to be installed with a couple of clicks. However, over the years I have always used Git Cola because it seems to be the only one providing one specific feature I use very often:

Stage Selected Lines

Many GUIs provide only something like this:

Stage Diff Hunk

Hunks often are not small enough for my way of committing changes. I don’t like committing whole files or huge chunk of code. I prefer small commits: easy to review, easy to `git bisect` if something goes south, easy to `git cherry-pick` if necessary. I call them micro-commits and they are so radicated in my way of working that I simply cannot working without them.

Said that, Git Cola is a bit tricky to install on Mac OSX. Here are the necessary steps for you and future-me 🙂

Install MacPorts

Download and install MacPorts for El Capitan:
https://distfiles.macports.org/MacPorts/MacPorts-2.3.4-10.11-ElCapitan.pkg

Install PyQT

Once you have installed MacPorts, you need to install PyQT. Fire up a Terminal and run:

sudo port selfupdate
sudo port install py34-pyqt4

Install Git Cola

We got Python dependencies. We are almost there. A couple of commands more:

sudo pip install sphinx
brew install git-cola
git clone git://github.com/git-cola/git-cola.git && cd git-cola
make git-cola.app
rm -fr /Applications/git-cola.app && cp -r git-cola.app /Applications

Done. We can now run cola from any folder containing a Git repo and the GUI will fire up.

Tuning

Edit your ~/.bash_profile file and add the following line:

alias cola=’cola &’

This will start cola without locking the terminal.

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