Using both regularly, the whole create issue 1234-> autocreate branch+MR -> git fetch+checkout 1234<TAB> -> code -> git push -> review -> resolve discussions+open issues for unresolved -> merge+autoclose+autoremove branch -> git fetch --prune flow is downright awesome† and really acted as a catalyst. GitHub just feels so antiquated and cranky compared to that so depending on what you're looking for this frustration can definitely go both ways.
† and it'll be even more awesome when we will soon enable per-branch review deployments which get auto-destroyed on branch removal, followed by auto-deploy of master in staging + manual in production, all neatly tracked in the environments tab.
They want to host code and integrate neatly with other CI providers.
I think that makes much more sense (why abandon Travis or Heroku for the sake of having "one" platform to rule them all... ?)
Our UX team has grown considerably recently and this is a big area of focus for us.
In addition to small UX improvements all over the product, we are also doing a massive overhaul to the overall navigation of GitLab starting in 9.4. This work will continue behind a feature toggle for a couple of releases. You can see the work here (https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/32794) and, as always we'd love to hear your thoughts on it, free to ping me directly in that issue on @mydigitalself to discuss.
Thank you for the feedback. We are actively working on making the merge request flow faster and easier to use. We have set up a round of user research to get insight into what works, doesn't work, and how we can make it better. Questions like: >"How do I find all open merge requests where I'm the approver" should be easy to answer and we are working on making that happen.
I would love to have your insights as part of our ongoing research. If you are interested, you can sign up to participate here:
Regarding searching by approvers, we definitely recognize it's a common flow. And we've documented it in an issue. https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ee/issues/1951. We hope to work on it soon.
In particular for the issue / merge request description areas, we want to get to a more collaborative design in the future when you can see other users making changes in super near-real-time, almost like Google docs. Currently, our issue descriptions already are updated in real-time, but it takes a few seconds for you to see updates. So we are working hard in this direction and we appreciate the validation that inline editing makes sense.
GitHub is also remote.
It's sad because I want gitlab to win (I believe in both their remote and open source approach) but Github's UX is so much better. We just acquired a company that uses Github so now we have a few engineers using both tools side by side and they all prefer Github's UX at this point so we might switch.