Git Repositories in Kaleidoscope

Another quick tip: how do you add a Git Repository to Kaleidoscope, and more importantly, why you really want that.

Adding a Repository to Kaleidoscope

Kaleidoscope keeps a list of known (recent) repositories. They are shown in the Repositories section of the Welcome window.

There are two ways to add a new repository to that list:

1. Open any file within a working directory of that repository in Kaleidoscope. In other words, as you work with git-based files in Kaleidoscope, their repositories will be picked up automatically.
2. Click Add Repository in the Repositories list and explicitly select the working directory.

Benefits of adding Repositories to Kaleidoscope

But why, you might ask, would I want to add a Git Repository? Kaleidoscope ain’t no Git client, is it?
Indeed, Kaleidoscope doesn’t allow you to commit or modify repositories. However, it can read repository information and greatly assist you in investigating your project’s history. Let’s explore some examples:

See Commit History

When you look at the details of a repository, you are immediately greeted with a list of recent commits. From there, it’s one click to see details about each commit and look at all of its changes.

Compare Branches, References, Tags, or Commits

Also from the same view, you can quickly open useful comparisons, like comparing any branch with your current working copy, compare any branches, tags, commits, …

Get Details of any Commit

There is a number of ways to see details about commits in Kaleidoscope, e.g. the Commit History (see above), the File History, or the brand new Lookup Git Commit window.

And of course it’s only one more click to see all changes of that commit.

Open a Changeset from Xcode

Once Kaleidoscope knows about a repository, you can quickly open a Changeset for any commit from within Xcode. Actually from any app on your Mac, but Xcode may be most obvious.

Many more Options

What we showed above was the Open Changeset in Kaleidoscope service, which operates on selected text in an app. But there are also other ways to open the changeset of a commit from other parts of the system:

• Open the Changeset for any commit identifier on the clipboard using Kaleidoscope Prism (add a keyboard shortcut for optimum speed)
• Use the kaleidoscope:// url scheme in the format kaleidoscope://changeset?commit_identifier, see our article on the kaleidoscope url scheme for more details.

Your Take

Did we miss something you find valuable in your work, or is Kaleidoscope missing a feature you could really benefit from? Let us know!