git-learning-game
Add a checkbox to display all Git objects, and have the arrows point in the proper direction
Hi! First of all, thanks a lot for this great project. I'm working as a teacher in a bootcamp and i'm considering giving it as a tool for learning git.
One little detail that can be missleading and it's not really correct, is that the arrows between commits are reversed.
In this picture I explain it.
I think this could be missleading for students understanding how git works.
What do you think?
It is also a bit jarring that the arrow from branch names points in one direction, but the similar looking arrows in the graph of versions (just with different color) point in the opposite direction. Technically they are the same, they use the same mechanism.
Hey! Thanks for commenting on this, @namirsab, and providing such thoughtful imagery!
This is intentional. We displayed it like you suggest at first, but when playtesting, many people were confused by this, because they expected the arrows to point in the direction of time. So we changed it. I'm also not really happy with how inconsistent this is with Git's data structure, but so far, we don't have a better solution, and would rather accommodate newcomers.
One way to think about it is that the yellow arrows are special "time" arrows in this game. Closing this for now, if you don't mind. We also have an FAQ entry about it on ohmygit.org. But definitely let us know more thoughts/other solution ideas for this!
@blinry All right, I can understand this reasoning... but please change the style of the arrow so that "time" arrows have different style (at least different color) than "pointer" / "reference" arrows (if it is not done already).
C1 ---> C2 ---> C3 <=== [main] <⋅⋅⋅⋅ HEAD
Here we have
-
--->is the "time" arrow (C1, then C2) -
<===is the "references" or "points to" arrow ('main' branch, or 'v1.0' tag pointing to a commit) -
<⋅⋅⋅⋅is "symref" reference (symbolic reference, or reference by name) - optional
A better solution IMHO would be to have a toggle that would change commit-to-commit arrows from "time" arrows to "based on" / "parent" arrows, with some nice animation. Just a thought.
A toggle like that would really be lovely! :) Also for displaying all objects (like trees and blobs). When we started this project, we had a series of "low level" levels, which explained those.