COMMUNITY CALL: Add your support for rebuilding Git Graph as an official VS Code feature

[Keavon]

Sadly, Git Graph seems to be abandoned. Currently there are over 7 million of us who have installed this extension, and probably millions of us use it daily as an indispensable tool in our workflows. But holding out hope for continued maintenance looks unlikely at this point. And this extension lacks an open source license, so a fork won't be possible. That means it must be reimplemented by either somebody making a competing extension, or by the VS Code team as a built-in feature.

The core idea, for a minimalistic, unopinionated Git visualization has proven to be very compelling. JetBrains IDEs have a very similar panel as well. Millions of us love the straightforward UI and features of this extension. Likely millions more would find it invaluable if they only knew to install it.

I believe the best way forward for us, as a community, is to campaign for a Git Graph inspired panel to be included as a built-in first-class feature in VS Code. That way it could receive official support and ongoing maintenance. And it would be available to millions more people who just aren't aware of this extension. The time is ticking before VS Code changes enough to break this extension outright (again).

So join me in supporting this VS Code feature request by clicking the 👍 on the original post to vote for it, and leaving comments in support of the feature. Microsoft prioritizes feature requests based on the number of thumbs up reactions on the original post. As a benchmark, the top-rated issue is 2700 votes and the rest on the first page of top-rated issues are in the range of 1400–500, and page two is 500–250, so we ideally need to attain at least several hundred votes to get this noticed and put on the roadmap. That's achievable with some work! Share this with anyone you know who uses Git Graph.

[curso-p]

Hey @Keavon!

There's another option: Some 5 years ago (wow!) Git Graph used to be licensed under the MIT license.
I'm the one to blame for this project changing its license.

I forked this project and figured I'll be faster making changes if I can make changes without asking for approval. I also found the code to be a bit spaghetti so I was thinking of doing a refactoring, mostly a complete rewrite. I'm not sure in what state the code is today, 5 years later (2 years ago was the last change in the repo).
On top of that, I wanted to change many things about the UI. I wanted this tool to be a full-featured Git GUI client. This led to Michael changing the license, and reporting me to Microsoft (I think), asking them to take down my new forked extension. (???) This went nowhere, but I also found myself without the time or motivation to continue with the project.

However, if there's more of us, we could continue from the forked MIT licensed version, which already exists and build on top of that. We don't have to start from scratch!

Here's the forked version of the extension: https://github.com/vfonic/vscode-ada-lightbulb
It's also in the VS Code Marketplace: https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=vfonic.ada-lightbulb

I just installed it and it still works!

Check it out and let me know what do you think. We can build from there.

EDIT: Here's more info on the license change drama: #69 (comment)

[jiayuqicz]

https://github.com/phil294/git-log--graph
https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=phil294.git-log--graph

here is a alternative plugin，share it.

[vfonic]

https://github.com/phil294/git-log--graph
https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=phil294.git-log--graph

here is a alternative plugin，share it.

This looks amazing!

I'm switching to this.
@jiayuqicz thanks for sharing!