I ask because I like console, but at the same time have difficulties remembering all the commands. I’d like to try a GUI that is comfortable to use with only a keyboard.
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My inbox got fediversized, fantastic feeling.
Magit with emacs (doom emacs to be fully honest). More a TUI, but definitely fully keyboard driven :)
Yeah this is THE best interface for git. Worth getting into Emacs just to use it id say.
I use the VS Code built-in git support for making commits, and fall back to the CLI for anything else.
You won’t have trouble remembering commands once you use them often enough. And you don’t need to know all of them, just the ones your workflow uses. My toolbox is commit, checkout, status, reset, rebase -i, merge, bisect. That’s all I need day-to-day.
I have some git blame extention in VSCode, but otherwise no. Something about using gui tool for git makes me feel so disconnected from it, like I’m not entirely sure what’s going on, and afraid I’m going to fuck something up
Also, I forget commands all the time. Mostly ones I don’t use often, like changing/adding/removing remotes, changing settings, etc.
I use TortoiseGit. The log window gives me overview and almost every action I need. Switching, rebasing, creating and deleting branches and tags, pushing, fetching, merging, view logs of files, diffing, blaming…
The log view is still much better than the VS Git log view. And due to it’s visual GUI it’s much better than CLI when going beyond just one branch or a low number of my own branches.
SourceTree when I was still a software engineer.
I’m a manager now, and I see people insisting on command line who have no idea what they’re doing. Then don’t! I think it’s an awful attitude that real programmers use git command line, and GUIs are for babies. Please call out this attitude whenever you see it. Use tools that work for you. Git has a terrible user experience, let’s face it.
I use sublime merge because I really like ST and want to further support the dev. I wish it had more integrations with github (and theoretically github alternatives), but I understand the reasoning not to. Before SM came out I just used the command line exclusively.
I never use Sublime Text, but I love Sublime Merge. I dunno why. Something about the UI just works for my brain, and the merge UI is amazing. I only ever open it with
smerge .in a directory, and it’s set to floating in my window manager so it pops up, I do my thing, and it goes away.
I use IntelliJ’s built-in git GUI.
I don’t understand why people use command line only. Sure, learn the commands so if you need to use them you can, but most GUIs are far more feature rich than command line. With IntelliJ, I can easily view differences before committing, have it do code quality scans, automatically clean up any code it can, more easily choose which files I want to commit vs the typical ‘git add .’ I see most people do with command line, have separate changelists when pair programming, and much more.
One argument that continually comes up is that command line is faster. I completely disagree. If I want to just commit the code without reviewing it, I can use 2 hot keys and the code is committed and pushed. But as I do a quick readthrough of all the code first and review issues from the code quality analysis it does take more time, but still less than it would to do comparable things with command line.
The IntelliJ merge UI is the only way I ever want to deal with merge conflicts. So much better than any of the alternatives I’ve tried!
I’m a heavy intellij user, but the git log UI always confuses me. When I open ‘git log’ via the action menu IntelliJ doesn’t focus my current branch. I am not sure if there’s some other menu I’m supposed to use to achieve that.
I do use the commit local changes, pull changes, merge branches functionality a good bit. My only feedback there is that I haven’t found a way to quickly commit changes without running git hooks. Each time it requires me to open up the gear icon and deselect ‘git hooks’. This is slower than using the command line where I can write
git commit --no-verifyand repeat the same command again and again. I know it’s a niche need, but it’s necessary for testing a rather archaic system we maintain.
I use Lazygit, which is a TUI. It is entirely controlled by keyboard shortcuts and has a lot of quick ways to do tedious things.
+1 for Lazygit. It doesn’t cover all of my needs so I have to use the CLI for a few small things, but for 99% of your typical git usage this tool is such a gift.
I’m curious: what’s missing for you?
I needed a few smaller features (like rebasing onto any commit, not just HEAD) and found the code quite easy to adapt to my needs (had to take half a day to learn Go first though).
A proper gerrit integration would be awesome though.
What’s lacking for you and where did you end up tool-wise?
It’s a paid app only available for Windows and Mac at the moment, but Fork may be worth a look: https://git-fork.com
I am using it too and I love it. I only know source tree as a competitor and in comparision it sucks…
You dont have to pay for it, even when using it comercially (unpess they changed that)
I use GitKraken. It has a beautiful interface. It’s free to use non-commercially but I pay $50/yr so that it can connect to my companies Enterprise account. I know I’m weak with git (I get the concepts but I’m a visual person) so the money is worth it to me.
It’s not free to work with certain things like private GitHub repositories unfortunately.
