Comment by prmph
Comment by prmph 20 hours ago
You might laugh, but in years of serious development, I have not come across a better git UI tool than SourceTree.
If I want to be hard-core, I'd use the original git CLI. SourceTree is unmatched in how it makes using git so much more pleasant for when you need to do something relatively simple, but which would be quite cumbersome to do with the CLI and most other tools I've tried.
Its file status and history view is unmatched IMO. I can easily stage/unstage hunks and even lines. The whole UI is generally quite polished and pleasant to use.
It's a real shame there is not a version for linux. I've tried every other git interface under the sun and keep coming back to it. In the meantime, I tried lazygit the past weekend and I think it is one of the better TUI git tools out there, definitely better than GitUI.
On Windows I've been using TortoiseGit for over a decade now and in terms of Git power user features in a GUI I think it's unmatched.
People who defend the CLI as the only real way to use Git simply haven't used a decent GUI for it. I consider myself a very advanced Git user, but I barely know the CLI commands off the top of my head.
A GUI really makes a lot of sense for something like Git, most of the time what you want to do is "contextual' from something like a list of files to commit or a log of commits and TortoiseGit is pretty good about exposing whatever you'd need to do.
I find that with GitKraken (aside from not being free), I just don't feel in control of what I'm trying to achieve with Git.
Git Extensions seemed pretty decent and possibly a nicer GUI paradigm than TortoiseGit, but when I tried it I found TortoiseGit to offer more power to me.
One thing that does annoy me a bit about TortoiseGit is that it has this philosophy of a new Window for everything, which for most things is not a problem, but is in a couple of places. For example, to work on a repository you tend to have to use the Explorer context menu to do things. I tend to open the git log window once and leave it open, and from it I can do pretty much everything. If it had some sort of "main app" view with a tab per repository you have open that would be awesome, instead of my having to have multiple open log windows. Similarly, for commits and PRs I like to double check each file's diffs. Its UI opens each one in a new window, but if it would rather have a sub pane from the commit view I think it would work better.
I used to use SourceTree in conjunction with TortoiseGit because I liked its tabbed UI for the simple things like pulling/fetching/pushing, switching branches, but I stopped using it about 5 years ago, the Windows version of it felt neglected in that it would often crash or become very slow.