Show HN: Watson – inline issue manager with GitHub support

by nhmood • 13 years ago

156 35 13 years ago

crowell• 13 years ago

I helped to test this and have been using it since. it is much less disruptive to work flow to just add comments in one place rather than add comments and have to go through github's ui for work items, bugs, etc.

Queue29• 13 years ago

IBM would like to have a word with you.

zekenie3• 13 years ago

I don't understand

codegeek2• 13 years ago

Apparently, IBM has a project named "Watson". So he is referring to the name conflict [0]

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6734100

WesleyJohnson• 13 years ago

IBM's super computer that challenged the ultimate Jeopardy participant, Ken Jennings, is named Watson.

zekenie3• 13 years ago

Got it. Thanks

asveikau• 13 years ago

It's also the name of the internal Microsoft tool that collects crash dumps. Much less public of a name though.

ozh• 13 years ago

Screenshots make this thing really interesting. Need to support more languages than just Ruby and Perl!

nhmood4• 13 years ago

Thanks! The app is written in both Ruby and Perl but it currently has support for parsing C / C++, Java, C#, Bash, Ruby, Perl, and Python files

girvo• 13 years ago

Should be pretty simple to get it working with PHP right? Also, any plans for GitLab issues support? If not, that might be fun to hack on this weekend...

scotth• 13 years ago

Just sent a pull request for CoffeeScript.

Thanks for the tool!

jbaiter• 13 years ago

I think it's language-independent, there's just two implementations available, one in Perl and one in Ruby.

samirahmed• 13 years ago

Yea i wonder how he made those gifs. It would be interested in a js gif gallery library like that

codegeek2• 13 years ago

This is awesome. We the developers love to put those little comments in code for issues/to-dos and syncing it with Github is solid. looks like someone needs to fork it for Python ?

One question though. When an issue is resolved, would that actually go back to the source file and delete that inline comment OR would it add the text "resolved" etc. In both cases though, would we not need a new commit to that source file ? Or does it leave the inline comment in its original state ?

nhmood4• 13 years ago

It currently leaves the inline comment in its original state. It didn't seem like a good idea to have an automated tool touch the code itself, watson leaves it up to the developer to remove the comment. The "resolved" tag only appears in the report when the issue is resolved on GitHub or Bitbucket to notify a user that they can either remove it or ignore working on that issue.

5vforest• 13 years ago

Agree with the general preface of not interrupting your flow with issue tracking. I've been using ghi (command line GitHub Issues)[1] and couldn't be happier.

[1] https://github.com/stephencelis/ghi

chrisdevereux• 13 years ago

Great idea! I've wanted something like this for a while, but never quite realised it.

What languages does it support? From the look of the front pages, C-based languages (C/C++/Obj-C) are ok.

Have you thought about offering this as a service? You could probably hook into Github and sync issues on commit using the same API that Jenkins uses.

nhmood4• 13 years ago

As mentioned below, it currently has support for parsing C / C++, Java, C#, Bash, Ruby, Perl, and Python files

It is pretty trivial to add support for any other language or comment type however, take a look at #get_comment_type in lib/watson/parser.rb

Never, thought about offering this as a service, having this as a commit hook is a very interesting idea though, thanks!

finnn• 13 years ago

What about encouraging use/automated installation of local git hooks, ie. run watson locally after a successful push. I've just begun looking at git hooks but this seems like exactly the sort of thing they were intended for

zekenie3• 13 years ago

Nice concept! Love it. The two examples are perl and ruby. Does that mean it wouldn't work in, say, javascript?

nspragmatic• 13 years ago

The example in the gif is actually C++, but JS should be fine according to the link. Ruby and Perl just happen to be the implementation languages.

"Avaliable (sic) in Ruby and Perl, but supports all languages!"

w0rd-driven2• 13 years ago

Super nice. Combining this with most support for updating issues via commit messages this makes it stupid easy to almost never leave the code. The only thing you likely can't easily do is deal with issue comments but that would be killer too. Never having to use the githib UI would be the ultimate workflow boon. I'm never a fan of needing to access websites and remember their UI as it feels disjointed from my typical working experience.

podviaznikov• 13 years ago

Sounds similar to guys who won ClojueCup: http://clojurecup.com/app.html?app=codenotes

NikolaTesla• 13 years ago

What did you use to create your gif screencasts?

nhmood4• 13 years ago

I used LICEcap (http://www.cockos.com/licecap/) from Cockos to generate the GIFs

I wrote the rotating gallery myself, it auto-figures out the duration of the GIF and does cycling for you. I'll probably release it sometime soon...

Procrastes• 13 years ago

What a clean, concise approach to both the tool and the demo.

Watson also reminds me of Gina Trapani's todo.txt[1], which I love.

1. http://todotxt.com/

habosa• 13 years ago

The sync with Github is awesome, looks like it would be great.

I have always had "todolist" on my machine aliased to grep -r "TODO*:" .

This basically just searches for all the places where I have TODO comments. This looks like a better way to do this for teams.

hellopat• 13 years ago

This is cool. I built something similar to this in Node. You start the tool and it monitors all files in your project folder for changes. Every time you save, it outputs a JSON object of all your tokened comments. The idea was to be able to plug it into another service, like a custom todo list app, or something like this. I haven't quite finished it, but maybe I'll clean it up a bit and push it to github this weekend.

Ideabile• 13 years ago

I start one month ago a project with less or more the same concept! But this seems more powerful, and already done! :)

Btw if you are interested checkout: http://www.ideabile.com/tirebouchon/doc/?file=index.php ( Is just a small preview)

wubbfindel• 13 years ago

Looks really promising! Would like to see this work for Gitlab also.

vocino• 13 years ago

This. Is. Awesome.

blt• 13 years ago

I love it. Good example of enriching the development environment without any kind of special files, databases, etc. Would be great to port it other issue trackers.

joshschreuder• 13 years ago

Looks awesome! If you remove the comment tag as part of a commit, does it / could it in future close the issue?

softworks• 13 years ago

Great work. Cloning the repo now. :)

Show HN: Watson – inline issue manager with GitHub support

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