Graphite

Raised as a usability problem by 19 people on Hacker News over 15 years (2012–2026), in 12 threads.

People raised many different problems with Graphite, but no single problem has yet been raised by 3 people in 3 different months and threads.

Unreviewed issues were grouped by machine: Claude Haiku labelled each comment as a usability complaint, named what it's about and summed up the problem in a line, and a small model grouped similar problems. Nobody has checked them by hand. Expect mistakes.

The newest 18 complaints

Stacked PR tool made too convoluted for what it does2026-07-30
Slow staged loading makes time to first diff frustratingly long, so user gives up2025-08-23
User hit a red error with no clear indication of where to find details2024-10-17
App lags 1-2 seconds on every update, and scaled SVG disappears from view2024-10-16
Couldn't find the button the error message tells the user to click2024-10-16
Each stroke, circle and box becomes its own layer automatically, making layers useless to the commenter2024-10-16
Local, GitHub and Graphite states get confused; sync commands needed constantly, adding mental overhead2024-09-11
Restacking breaks collaborators working on dependent branches; hard to understand what happens under the hood2024-02-23
Merging stacked PRs from GitHub's web interface is very confusing2024-02-23
Requires too much upfront design and is a pain to install and manage2023-06-28
Graphite's UI has atrocious shortcomings that small shops must work around2015-11-09
Hard to install and manage; doesn't play well with virtualenv, making dependencies horrible2015-01-18
Hard to install and manage because it conflicts with virtualenv dependencies2014-12-12
Shares a name with a common material, making it hard to search for and confusing2014-12-12
Too many moving parts and a poor web interface to use2013-07-12
Hard to set up and the documentation is poor2012-11-08
Setup took days; documentation was incomplete with TODO sections and counters graphed wrongly2012-11-08
Setting it up is very painful and would take hours to learn2012-11-08