Interactive next/checkout

[bcongdon]

I had a couple ideas / feature requests for interactive elements in git-branchless, and wanted to start a thread to get feedback before opening PRs:

Interactive Checkout

It'd be nice to have an interactive checkout command (maybe pick or smartcheckout?) based on smartlog. My initial thought was to display a smartlog with an additional suffix identifier/"hint", followed by a prompt:

Using numeric hints:

Using EasyMotion/Vimium-style hints:

Using skim:

@arxanas suggested the EasyMotion/skim approaches. Personally, I prefer the EasyMotion approach here of the three. Skim's UI is quite nice, but it doesn't allow for formatting/coloring of the fuzzy select item, so it's difficult to nicely display all the information from the smartlog. However, using skim would probably be a nicer experience in scenarios where you're picking from a large number of commits.

Interactive Next

Currently next has --oldest and --newest flags to "guide" the traversal. However, sometimes you have more than 2 commits with the same parent, and an interactive way to pick between them would be nice. Demo interactive selection for next (note the -i flag):

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Any thoughts?

[arxanas]

These are some cool prototypes!

For the command name, I was thinking that it would just be git branchless checkout, and then aliased to git co by default.

What do you plan to do as far as pagination, when there are many elements in the smartlog, and they don't all fit on the screen?

Skim's UI is quite nice, but it doesn't allow for formatting/coloring of the fuzzy select item,

I see that display returns an AnsiString — does this not work for that purpose?

Tangentially related: if we use Skim, then it would be nice to highlight the commit element in the preview window, so that the user can get a sense of where in the commit graph they're checking out to. It seems like ItemPreview should also support coloration.

For the interactive next/prev, maybe we should reuse the UI from interactive checkout in some way? That way, the user wouldn't have to get acquainted with multiple ways of selecting commits.