Interesting thought - do you mean like a line of text that displayed above that verbally described what's happening?

I was considering adding some more detailed text-based output on the command-line detailing what was going on, but I didn't think about adding it directly into the image/video.

I think it would be helpful in the blog post to list the series of changes happening to the files before the animations

Good suggestion, I will add that.

Exactly that. For example, the HEAD tag moving to another commit doesn’t mean much if a developer doesn’t know what HEAD is or what git reset does.

Hey there fellow Mac user! And thanks for testing it out - were you able to get it installed or is it still chugging along?

Yes I feel your pain with Homebrew which can take forever just to check for updates on installed packages, before it even gets to installing anything new.

I know the current installation method of having to first install Manim's dependencies is not ideal, but in most of my testing it was relatively painless.

However going forward I am going to be looking for ways to make it a single install instead of various steps that differ across platforms.

Yes, i am testing it now.

So far seems good, initially i was getting some very slow animation times but adding the `--low-quality` flag seems to work well.

I am planning to do an internal session in my company on Git, and will be using this tool to help them visualise some of the concepts :)

Sweet! Yeah the slow animation is a Manim performance limitation, I think (hope) their community is working on improving that.

Yes --low-quality works for testing but the fastest way would be to first test without the --animate flag at all, so you just get a final image of the command's effect.

Then once you get that you can add the --animate flag to generate your final video to share.

And awesome to hear it will be used for your company session! I love teaching people about Git. Feel free to share the tool with them so they can try it out as well!

I saw the video and instantly recognized the manim style, it looks great!

Manim rocks.

Haha wow you posted this before I could! I created Git-Sim and hope that folks can get some use and value out of it. Happy to answer any questions anyone might have, and especially looking for feedback so that I can improve the tool. Also if anyone is interested in contributing let me know and also check out the project Github page:

https://github.com/initialcommit-com/git-sim

Most devs overlook an excellent resource for improving their coding and dev skills - learning from early versions of open source codebases.

Reading other peoples' code and understanding it can be incredibly useful in various contexts.

In the spirit of this, I tried my hand at understanding how Git's code works. It turns out that Git's original version - i.e. Git's initial commit - is written in the C programming language and consists ONLY of ~1,000 lines of code.

I found it so interesting and learned so much - and want to encourage other devs to do the same.

Jumping into a new codebase can be intimidating, so I put together a guidebook to help devs learn how Git's original code actually works - the Decoding Git Guidebook for Developers.