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Comment by tokenizerrr | Hacker News Reader

> Given all these great options, it's not clear to me why anyone would go back to a separate GUI tool?

You're clearly a Linux person. Or at least a command line person. I am too. Quite a few programmers at my work have never used anything but Windows and barely touch any servers. So they don't really use the command line at all, ever.

They also insist on using graphical clients for Git. This is of course horribly inefficient and leads to plenty of problems (mostly due to their choice of the Eclipse Git Client, which seems to have a lot of bugs). But they think the command line is scary and too difficult to understand.

So, my point is, there are a lot of people who have used GUIs their entire life and are used to be able to figure things out by just staring at the GUI and spending 30 minutes aimlessly clicking about. Then when they use a CLI program they have no idea what to do, and get frustrated. Because they're not used to RTFM.

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I use the command line for the majority of my day and I still use a Git GUI (Tower for Mac) because in one single window I have all my repositories traversable, I can instantly see what is changing, and get a diff of a file in one click without leaving the window.

For any commit/merge/push/pull standard maneuvers (probably 99.8%) I do, Tower is faster. Anything 'complicated' and I'm using git in the command line.

But I do agree about the Eclipse git client. It's the worst client I think I have ever seen. Every dev I know that relies on it regularly finds away to bork their local version or to screw up the central repository on a regular enough basis that it's not even a surprise anymore.

At work there are a few devs like that. I should specify that they are really good developers, and they are certainly able to work "the Linux way" if they have to, it's just that they are more comfortable using GUIs and "fat" IDEs rather than a CLI + a "lean" text editor.

Still, I am convinced that, for advanced users, CLI wins over GUI. Even outside of the sw dev world, I see many professionals (e.g. graphic designers) who, in order to increase productivity, learn so many keyboard shortcuts that they end up using their keyboard more than their mouse: in my mind, I see that as a "CLI-zation" of the GUI.

Another point is ease of sharing: with CLI-based work-flows, you can just write down everything in the company wiki, all is just text. The thought of having to take screenshots in order to describe a work-flow to a colleague (vs. just writing down commands) drives me mad.

What's wrong with GitHub Desktop? Just enter your commit message and click "Sync". Much easier than using the command line.

We don't use GitHub and looking at https://desktop.github.com/ it's not a Git client, but a GitHub client.

It's a git client: https://help.github.com/desktop/faq/articles/do-you-support-...

Ah ok, I'll let my Eclipse Git coworkers know about this. Shame there isn't a Linux version or I could give it a go myself to see how it compares. I assume it does branching well.

I recommend GitHub Desktop to most of my coworkers that come to me with git problems. It's nice in that it also installs a command line version of git that I use with Powershell. In that sense it is useful because they can grow into power users should the need arise.

I found it even strange for a Windows app.

Look at the Session GUI. You can click on a list of saved sessions, but they won't show up in the input configs at the top till you press load, but if you doubleclick on them a new session is started.

> Look at the Session GUI. You can click on a list of saved sessions, but they won't show up in the input configs at the top till you press load, but if you doubleclick on them a new session is started.

Of all things, I don't think that is a bad design choice. I would get really annoyed if all the changes I've made in the different tabs were to disappear because I happened to click on one of the already existing sessions in the list. Perhaps because I'd want to update it.

We wanted to switch to Git from Mercurial because we wanted something like Gitlab. The only reason we didn't was that there wasn't any app for Git which was as user-friendly as TortoiseHg.

Tower is quite nice, in late beta for Windows.

This looks even cleaner than TortoiseHg and that's an achievement! Thank you. I guess it wasn't available when we first looked.

Have a look at Gitkraken - https://www.gitkraken.com/features

There is TortoiseGit!

Which pales in comparison to the multi-platform goodness of TortoiseHg since it is an independent creation designed from the ground up for the distributed workflow rather than a reworked TortoiseSVN. I wish someone would do a Git conversion of THG.

Besides not being cross platform, how does it pale in comparison?

I've been using it for over five years and I can't imagine what it could possibly be missing...

Tortoisegit is horrible compared to tortoisehg. I dont even understand why they share the same name, it's a totally different program.

We considered switching to Git as well for a similar reason (GitLab). However we discovered Phabricator provides similar toolset at GitLab and also supports Mercurial. It's open source - you can run a local instance (no cost but also no support) or pay for them to host. They also recently started a free plan where they will host an instance with up to 5 users.

https://www.phacility.com/phabricator/

We've been using it for 2+ years at this point and glad we stuck with Mercurial.

Wow.

I have to say, there's a certain irony in that GitLab uses Hg and not Git...

I think you may have misread the parent. GitLab uses git http://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/

Here are three suggestions:

1. Check out Gogs (Github clone written in Go). Gitlab is quite heavy, we would've needed an extra machine to run it, so we tried Gogs and absolutely love it.

2. Using the command line is actually quite helpful the get in the "git mindset" (and workflow). Give it a try and you won't want to go back to gui tools.

3. Assuming you are on Windows, check out Github Desktop and Tower.

I highly recommend you give SmartGit a try. The best way I can describe it is it feels like an IDE for Git/Mercurial. In a similar vein to TortoiseHG. Unfortunately, it's paid software, but one of the few pieces of paid software that I'll ever recommend.

I found SourceTree to be excellent on Windows. Use it on OSX & Windows 10 here.

Have they fixed their exrreme performance issues yet? For years the product was completely unusable because simple operations like marking a file would take 10secs while maxing out your CPU. Google for it and you will find many threads on their forum, all with various hacks and solutions that some times work and some times doesn't, the problems seem to be machine dependent so some people get the problems while others dont and they can easily ignore fixing the issues permanently. I haven't bothered to try any updates for the past year since I lost faith in them.

A shame, because otherwise the product looks good and has a good workflow.

How can you survive as a developer without at least passing familiarity with the command line? This is worrisome indeed.

>Quite a few programmers at my work have never used anything but Windows and barely touch any servers. So they don't really use the command line at all, ever.

>They also insist on using graphical clients for Git. This is of course horribly inefficient and leads to plenty of problems (mostly due to their choice of the Eclipse Git Client, which seems to have a lot of bugs). But they think the command line is scary and too difficult to understand.

I still find it hard to believe that there are people like this out there.

You're a programmer! You write in programming languages all day, but you think at a new language, a relatively simple one used by thousands of people who aren't professional programmers, will be hard to learn.

I guess Steve Yegge was right. Programmers really do hate learning new languages.

Those people are the majority (or at least a large plurality). Quit your job as a game dev/web dev at a large software vendor/startup and join the enterprise Java/.NET devs working on middleware and be amazed at how scared they are of anything outside of the IDE.

The thing is, I actually can't imagine what it's like to be those people. I mean, I'm trying, but I literally can't: I log into my computer every day over SSH, I write and use CLI tooling constantly. I'm an emacs user, and if your tooling doesn't have a CLI mode, I'm usually not interested.

I can't stand IDEs and frameworks because I hate having things done magically for me, partly because "magic" tends to break, and partly because I have a compulsive need to know how things work, if not deeply than at least superficially. I can't stand Java and languages like it because the absurd amount of boilerplate they generate seems to require such things, it's generally considered a fool's errand to write Java outside of an irritatingly complex IDE, and it seems to attract complex frameworks like a pile of crap attracts flies.

An IDE dependance (not preference, dependance: you're terrified of going outside of an IDE) doesn't just imply a distaste for CLIs, it often implies a desire to have things done for you, for "magic."

Do these sorts of people rewrite software, even if there's a convenient framework, just because? Do they think about cache misses (even if they don't do anything about them)? Do they learn new languages and concepts on a whim, because, "I thought it seemed cool?"

Thinking like these people doesn't just mean ignoring years of knowledge, but also actually pretending that a deeply ingrained part of who I am, something I though near intrinsic to programmers (because what other sort of person would do this sort of thing voluntarily?).

I actually can't, and that kind of amazes me.

There are many people who are completely lost without an IDE, or even without their IDE. Some of them have no idea of what is going on underneath. It is not rare to read such people around here.

That's... terrifying. I mean, I am often in awe of my own staggering ignorance, but at least I'm doing something about it. I hazily know how CPUs work (more or less), I understand why cache misses matter (now: thanks HN). I understand the basics of Big O, what kinds of functions are computable, and why O(n^2) or O(n!) is really bad. I know some common algorithms for simple problems, and I know how to recognize the Travelling Salesman when I see it.

That's not all that I know, not by a long shot, but I know that what I know is a tiny drop in the ocean of what I don't.

It's just baffling that there are people out there, likely older than me, who aren't actively trying to learn more. I mean, if you don't like computing enough to be motivated to learn more about it, why are you in the industry?

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