gitvb

i liked the idea of gitbutler and it's virtual branches, but it seemed to have problems working with all my other tools and seemed a bit unstable

this may also be similar to gitlens' "Worktrees" feature but i haven't tried that out

this is probably more unstable than gitbutler and other tools that are appearing, but it doesn't hide anything from you and is a purely cli tool

this is a proof-of-concept/work-in-progress, hence why it's written in bash!

works goes directly ontop of the `MAIN_BRANCH` env var, it defaults to `MAIN`

to install this, add everything to your path. every 'function' is its own file here to help with debug/development

obviously this won't be bash long-term, its good enough to experiment with though

list of user facing commands to get started:

gitvb-status: shows status, start here, this always fetches the remote when its ran
gitvb-pick: picks a branch onto your main branch
gitvb-unpick: unpicks a picked branch
gitvb-resync: resyncs all your picked branches by rebasing them on the remotes main branch
gitvb-commit: commits the current stage onto a picked branch
gitvb-publish: publish changes to a picked branch

there's also some helpful commands for dealing with the remote:

gitvb-remote-create: create a branch on the remote
gitvb-remote-rename: renames a branch, note this'll close any linked MR/PRs
gitvb-remote-rm: deletes a branch from both the local and remote
gitvb-remote-ls: lists branches available on the remote
gitvb-remote-track: downloads a ref of the branch on your machine for tracking locally

some other commands you may want to be aware of:

gitvb-sync-unpicked: syncs an unpicked branch, rebasing it on remotes main branch
gitvb-s: only the file print out of gitvb-status without fetching, good `git status` drop-in
gitvb-diff: shows the diff between the remote and any tracked branch you specify
gitvb-nuke: entirely removes all of gitvb's changes on your repo, without modifying the underlying branches
gitvb-rewrite: starts interactive rebase of a picked branch so you can rewrite its commits
gitvb-publish-all: publishes everything in a single command
gitvb-send: combo gitvb-commit + gitvb-publish, allows for staging and running a single command to commit+push to a picked branch
gitvb-pick-new: combines gitvb-remote-create and gitvb-pick into a single command

i am not responsible for the destruction of your repos

- benjamin