New GHD Electron does not show changed files the same way as in GHD Classic

Description

New GHD Electron does not show changed files the same way as in GHD Classic

Version

• GitHub Desktop: 1.1.1
• GHD Classic: 223

• Operating system: macOS 10.13.4

Steps to Reproduce

1. Clone a repo containing .strings files with line endings that are not the same as your host OS.

Possibly also:

1. .gitconfig

[diff "localizablestrings"]
textconv = "iconv -f utf-16 -t utf-8"

1. .gitattributes

*.strings   diff=localizablestrings

Expected Behavior

Both apps should show the same list of changed files

Actual Behavior

GHD Classic

• shows files with changed line endings (eg. 15 files total)
• shows .strings files as Text

GHD Electron

• does not show files with changed line endings (eg. 10 files total)
• shows some .strings files as Binary

Additional Information

See the affected files in this PR: https://github.com/aonez/Keka/pull/167/files

Screenshots

GHD Classic

GHD Electron

[billygriffin]

Hi @gingerbeardman, that’s a reasonable thing to be concerned with and sorry for the lack of comms around the change. The Mac app and the Windows app also worked somewhat differently when they were separate apps, so when we merged them into the current one, there were bound to be a few things that were inconsistent when moving from old to new. Again, I apologize that you were thrown off by the inconsistency, and hopefully moving forward we’re able to do a better job in making things intuitive and reasonably consistent over time. I certainly hope our continued improvements to Desktop will make you more enthusiastic about using it, and otherwise I hope you find the right tool to meet your needs and help make you as productive and your work as enjoyable as possible. 😄

[gingerbeardman]

The problem for me is that I had (with Classic) come to expect to see files that have changed in a certain way and Desktop changed the behaviour unexpectedly, without any announcement, in a way that made no obvious sense (not showing files that have changed making me think I’ve done something wrong? and showing text files as binary that were previously and correctly shown as text?).

As well as being unexpected I then had to waste some time figuring out what was wrong (arguably nothing, but the surprise of the new app doing things differently) and then even more time posting this issue.

I mean, we are a year on from this issue being posted, so I am sure the horse has bolted already, but meaningful changes in behaviour like this should be signposted and/or revertible because being forced to move from one working app to a new app that does things a differently for no obvious reason, seems wrong. Migrations should be as smooth as possible, forced migrations even more so. Even after a year I really don’t like Desktop compared to Classic. I do not look forward to having to use it, which is a real shame.

I can’t remember whether I thought this was a bug, or whether I was asking for Desktop to work like Classic. I think I was just annoyed having to spend time figuring out WTF when I shouldn’t have had to. I had changed from Classic to Desktop and my config had not changed so I think its reasonable as a user to expect things to work the same, by and large.

Also, having just re-read the thread I see that I missed a request for further info. Sorry about that!

$ git config --show-origin -l | grep diff

matt@MacBookPro-Matt:~/Projects/Keka$ git config --show-origin -l | grep diff
file:/Users/matt/.gitconfig	difftool.sourcetree.cmd=opendiff "$LOCAL" "$REMOTE"
file:/Users/matt/.gitconfig	difftool.sourcetree.path=
file:/Users/matt/.gitconfig	mergetool.sourcetree.cmd=/Applications/SourceTree.app/Contents/Resources/opendiff-w.sh "$LOCAL" "$REMOTE" -ancestor "$BASE" -merge "$MERGED"
file:/Users/matt/.gitconfig	diff.tool=opendiff
matt@MacBookPro-Matt:~/Projects/Keka$