> but why hide all of that useful navigation behind an ambiguous, easy to miss, unlabeled icon?
Few reasons:
1. After redesign its possible to use application without sidebar for most of day-to-day tasks. I personally use sidebar 2-3 times per day while using GitLab whole day. Keeping it hidden by default allow me to focus on context and save screen space (really valuable on small laptop)
2. Both sidebar and project navigation visible at same time confused a lot of users. For example user clicked on sidebar "Issues" while they believed it will take them to project issues page.
> The decision of what does and doesn't go in the sidebar is very non-intuitive
We try to put top level navigation into sidebar and everything else in the main page. For example navigation to `Projects` is in sidebar however tabs to switch between starred projects or personal projects is in main body.
> For example, in groups and user profiles you can find the list of projects in the main body of the page (and it's not visible immediately). Why is it not in the sidebar if you have a sidebar?
> And then the ordering is also a bit weird -- I don't think many people would consider the order in GitLab to be "in order of importance" or even "regular use"
Ordering of projects is either by last activity or alphabetically. But in any case there is usually a dropdown in UI to sort by other criteria.
> And why can't I see the set of files in the repo when I first open it?
You can set what to see first at https://gitlab.com/profile/preferences page. We believe README is something people would like to see first we allow users to set different default page based on their preferences.
P.S. Thank you very much for your feedback. It will help us make GitLab UI more intuitive.
GitLab CTO here. You can easily update your GitLab at Digital Ocean because it uses omnibus package. We recommend updating GitLab for performance updates, security updates and new features. Please use this guide for update https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/omnibus-gitlab/blob/master/doc...
Same for me. I used Hound for a while but it was annoying to see all this comments. So I just added Rubocop check inside `rake test` so build is broken if you have code style issues
Few reasons:
1. After redesign its possible to use application without sidebar for most of day-to-day tasks. I personally use sidebar 2-3 times per day while using GitLab whole day. Keeping it hidden by default allow me to focus on context and save screen space (really valuable on small laptop)
2. Both sidebar and project navigation visible at same time confused a lot of users. For example user clicked on sidebar "Issues" while they believed it will take them to project issues page.