@akjcv after using it for a year i think i’ve come around on having the default view be a shortlog and a list of tags, even though i never use branches, because i find myself referencing commits other than HEAD as often as i find myself referencing HEAD. i actually think that the github-style display has encouraged people to think of repositories as buckets of files rather than histories of changes, which has encouraged worse commit messages and practices and kind of obviated the utility of using git at all over just sticking everything in dropbox.

agreed on the other points, though. i’ve been meaning to restyle my gitweb because i think the default styling is terrible, but i haven’t found the time. i think better CSS could really improve things, and i've done a bit of JS to hack things like markdown rendering on after-the-fact.