Skip to content

Comment on Ask HN: What software/app do you wish would exist?

Comments

A tool that lets me do code reviews, but like really good and integrated. I use gitlab on a daily basis, but it's painstakingly slow and basically just lets me stare at text. Some of the below features may be available, but not satisfactory in my opinion:

- I want to see the changes in a directory tree that I can navigate through!

- I want to comment on any piece of code, not only changes and their surroundings!

- I want to hide things, or mark them as "seen", to be able to look at things in the order I want without any risk of losing progress!

- I want to be able to filter/sort by the "change type", e.g. Imports, renames, indentation changes etc.!

- I want the diff to be aware of programming semantics, e.g. know when a function just moved from one file to another, or I add a method overload and don't get a diff telling me I added a closing bracket and another whole method signature in the middle of the old method!

- Let me type code! I want to try out and propose changes!

- I want freedom editing my review before submitting it the way I have freedom editing my branches before committing it!

- I want to have single comments refer to ranges of changes, which aren't necessarily connected or in the same file!

- I want to easily see what happened to the changes since I reviewed them! (Not a clickable link "changed since then bla bla", show me right there!).

- And probably most important: It has to be fast! Hyperbole: Having to wait for the page to load for a minute for large diffs, and then having to wait another minute for all changes to _actually_ be visible is a no-go.

The available tooling is already very powerful, but it still frequently fails me and I believe having this be extremely polished would be a real productivity game changer. Maybe there are already some great tools? Last time I had to look over a huge amount of changes I resorted to a patch file; grepping away unnecessary changes like package renames etc and just deleting text lines I considered sufficiently reviewed.

delta-force.net does this I believe. Not free though!

AboutSource Built by g1lg1l

Hackerly is an independent reader for Hacker News, built on the public HN API. Not affiliated with Y Combinator.