Products · Product
Perforce
Raised as a usability problem by 36 people on Hacker News over 19 years (2008–2026), in 33 threads.
No issue was raised by at least 3 people in 3 threads this year.
No issue was raised by at least 3 people in 3 threads in the last 5 years.
Every issue, all time, most people first
Merging and branching are easy to get wrong with wrong flagsUnreviewed
20082026- No lightweight branching, so shared branch gets broken check-ins and developers face complex workarounds2023-05-02
- Perforce branches are horrible and merging them back to HEAD is painful2019-01-04
- Merging between branches is a gamble that often messes up basic merges2018-04-10
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 42 complaints
- Perforce has a terrible UI that is hard to use2026-10-13
- Its user experience is horrible, making it hard to use2026-06-22
- Workspaces drift into unique local files and permissions, hard to track deviations2026-06-18
- Setup needed an Azure account, and triggers had to be changed by asking support2026-06-17
- Default reconcile takes hours or days and often never finishes2026-06-17
- Files get marked read-only, so people must work around it constantly2025-02-05
- Files become read-only on edit, and the system blocks saving so users can't tell how to save changes2025-02-05
- Every action is convoluted, slow and painful to perform2023-07-06
- GUI lacks many options, forcing users to fall back to the command line2023-07-05
- No lightweight branching, so shared branch gets broken check-ins and developers face complex workarounds2023-05-02
- Everything is convoluted and ridiculously slow to use2023-01-09
- Streams are a loosely enforced hierarchy bolted onto branches, with many footguns2022-06-17
- Branches are very slow and isolated; stream switching takes forever2022-06-16
- Couldn't get the tool to recognise the P4IGNORE environment variable despite trying everything2022-05-29
- Branches are hard to use compared with git, even with streams2022-03-31
- Command line UX and workspace mapping/branching workflow are dramatically inferior2021-11-06
- No easy way to try several approaches; shelves pile up as the only option2021-11-06
- Felt clunky to use, with file locking and change lists disliked after brief use2020-11-17
- Checking out files is so difficult the commenter had to build a command-line tool2020-11-17
- Version control makes branches difficult, wasting time compared to Git2020-05-16
- Log window doesn't scroll to the bottom, so the user has to scroll manually2020-01-11
- Clunky and sometimes infuriating to use2020-01-07
- Commits take minutes and the version control tool can't keep up2019-10-12
- Perforce is unpleasant to use day to day, with serious UX problems2019-10-12
- Perforce branches are horrible and merging them back to HEAD is painful2019-01-04
- Merging between branches is a gamble that often messes up basic merges2018-04-10
- Can't unshelve the same file into two changelists, making related changes hard to separate2018-03-15
- Forced rebase on commit can break things and cannot be reliably handled2018-03-14
- The Perforce UI crashes easily2017-12-10
- Code review relies on shelves, and conflicts and merges are hard to handle2016-12-21
- Struggles with the command line interface for version control tasks2016-11-11
- Artists are asked to check in on every save, which they find annoying2016-10-25
- Must request permission to edit each file before changing it2016-05-27
- Author can't understand how to write software or review code with it2016-04-02
- Command line tool has a very poor interface2016-01-24
- Slow and cryptic to use2015-10-08
- Command line output is inconvenient to parse and there is no git-style index2015-08-05
- Creating a dev branch takes a dozen manual steps and is extremely hard2015-04-12
- Forgotten new files go unnoticed until testing or production breaks2012-03-16
- Perforce and git-p4 tooling are described as pretty awful to use2012-01-02
- Must submit multiple changelists when one file has different bugfixes2010-02-17
- Merging and branching are easy to get wrong, with wrong flags or missing branches causing problems2008-11-25