Using Github for Processing sketchbook

Hello! Nice to see you all on this nice new forum! (I <3 markdown! :) )

In the spirit of 2.0, I just started a new sketchbook to do away with all the conflicting libraries and out of date sketches that were clogging up my old sketchbook folder. Previously I was using Dropbox to sync that across computers, which worked fine.

My new plan is to use Github instead, so I can avoid the nightmare of circleSketch1, circleSketch2, circleSketch2b, etc etc etc. Is there any reason why having a sketchbook as one big git repo is a bad idea? I could do separate repos for each sketch, but I'd have to manually sync libraries, tools and modes.

Interested in any thoughts you might have.

Thanks!

Tagged:

Comments

  • Indeed, I prefer much more this move to Markdown than the previous attempt with a so called WYSIWYG editor that was poor and generated HTML 2.0 code... :) A bit more technical for newbies, but nothing hard to learn, there are some icons to help. And after all, that's a technical forum! And that's a good training to go to Stackoverflow later... I just wish we have real time preview like on this site. 8)

    I used Bazaar as DVCS for my code, and I started to use Git for new projects, now that it has decent Windows support. But I hadn't made a switch to Git for my old repositories (yet?), as I see no compelling reason (no need to create new branches for these simple compound projects).

    The spirit is overall the same anyway: I have a folder per language, grouping lot of little programs, mostly little experiments to try stuff. So I have a repository for my Java code, one for all my Processing sketches (my sketchbook, actually), one for Lua, Scala, and so on.

    So, yes, one repository for the whole sketchbook seems to be a good organization for me. Sketches are generally small, you rarely make a new branch to try something new on them, as it is easy to go back to a previous version, and might not have several alternative versions simultaneously. Or, if the variants are significantly different and if you want to keep each version, well, side-by-side versions with slightly different names are OK here.

    Of course, it is mostly my own way of working with Processing, if you have a different workflow, you might want a different organization.

  • Cool, thanks for that. I wasn't sure if having a single big fat repo was OK, but I guess I can always break projects out into their own repos as and when necessary.

  • Just a quick follow up to this, the Github clients for Windows and OS X make managing this dead simple. It's easier to keep track of only files that have changed- when I use the command line I tend to git commit -a -m 'commit log' rather than type the name of the file/s which is not good practice but much easier :|

Sign In or Register to comment.