Comment by jonathanlydall

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.