Show the description more often

[samholmes]

I usually name my folders ProjectName and then place a repo directory called "app" in with other directories for documents and files related to the project but not necessarily apart of the repo. So, I use the git description to help me describe my git repo (I usually just put the project name in the description). In this case, there are two places I'd like to see the git description: 1. The window title. 2. The window that shows all my recent git repos that I opened.

[rowanj]

I think I understand the problem you're having, but I don't think the .git/description is necessarily a good place for this information; for two reasons which I'll illustrate here:

the-cheat:gittest rowanj$ mkdir descr
the-cheat:gittest rowanj$ cd descr/
the-cheat:descr rowanj$ git init
Initialized empty Git repository in /Users/rowanj/Code/gittest/descr/.git/
the-cheat:descr rowanj$ ls
the-cheat:descr rowanj$ cat .git/description
Unnamed repository; edit this file 'description' to name the repository.
the-cheat:descr rowanj$ echo "A custom description" > .git/description
the-cheat:descr rowanj$ cd ..
the-cheat:gittest rowanj$ git clone descr/ descr-clone
Cloning into 'descr-clone'...
warning: You appear to have cloned an empty repository.
done.
the-cheat:gittest rowanj$ cd descr-clone/
the-cheat:descr-clone rowanj$ ls
the-cheat:descr-clone rowanj$ cat .git/description
Unnamed repository; edit this file 'description' to name the repository.

1. There there's a large chunk of standard-ish text there in all repositories, which most people never set a description on. They all start as something along the lines of "Unnamed repository; edit this file 'description' to name the repository.", not an empty or missing file. I don't think we can add that to the title bar of every GitX window; and I can't find any plumbing command to test if it has been changed from the default or not - just that the description is intended for GitWeb to display.
2. Like hooks and remotes, the description doesn't follow the repository through a clone (or commit, or fetch, etc.), so it isn't even going to stick with the project on another machine.

I'm pretty sure the canonical way to name a repository is the name of the top-level folder; so instead of:

ProjectOne/app
ProjectTwo/app

You could have:

ProjectOne/ProjectOne{.git}
ProjectTwo/ProjectTwo{.git}

Or:

ProjectOne/app/ProjectOne{.git}
ProjectTwo/app/ProjectTwo{.git}

Or add your documents and other files to the repository, or store your code under a separate tree... I think the position I'm gravitating toward is that this is an organisational issue that could be simply avoided.

I guess the other option would be to introduce attributes like project name into a ".gitx" file; or use git config, or similar. Perhaps the closest to the behaviour you mention would be to add a git config flag that enables showing the description on a per-repository or per-user basis; i.e. if we do this, you'd have to run git config [--global] gitx.show-description true