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Comment by SadWebDeveloper | Hacker News Reader

Seems pretty difficult to use, almost on the same level as trying to learn to use vim/emacs on 2017, somehow i expected a "poweful (G)UI" rather than a text-based one. Anyone has a good recommendation for a good GUI for GIT, GIT-GUI its a really confusing and jetbrains integrations felt like someone with heavy background on cvs/svn made the interface.

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The question is: How well do you know git? If you know it well, magit should be pretty intuitive. If you don't know git, you might be overwhelmed by all the strange names and options. But they're all just git -- all exposed for you to use.

What is difficult about it? I don't mean that combatively. Genuinely curious. I'd think a toolbar might help some folks, but I also expect some folks need a different interface.

From the example of kickstarter, it seems completely undiscoverable -- things just keep happening and popping up and down, with no obvious indication of how, or why, those things were selected.

It's a demo which I'm sure appeals to emacs users, who are the target, but I couldn't imagine using it as a non-emacs user. I previously tried learning emacs to use OrgMode, and gave up after a couple of days when I failed to master even basic text editing skills.

It's actually very discoverable. The video lacked the sidebar showing the keypresses, though.

Generally, each time you press a key that is part of a sequence, you get a pop-up explaining what further keys are available. So for instance, I opened magit (M-x magit-status) on a project and pressed ? (for help):

https://i.imgur.com/c5cmmpB.png

The popup lists the keys I can use on magit-status page, and if you know git it's pretty obvious where to go in most cases.

Also, at any time you can press ? and then one of the key listed in the popup to get a detailed description and/or an appropriate manpage.

The key bindings are typically very mnenomic. For example "s" stages, "c" brings up the commit window, "b" the branches window, etc.

There are a few that go against this. "x", for example. But it really becomes almost conversational.

Edit: corrected spelling of mnenomic. :) Not convinced it is correct word, oddly...

The correct spelling should be mnemonic.

Yeah, originally I put pneumonic. Which, is definitely wrong.

I just keep thinking there is another word that is even more applicable than mnemonic. Guessing I'm just confusing myself.

This is my original point, tbh i didn't know about magit before this post, when i first opened the link and find out about it somehow i expected a GUI rather than a text-based app, m sure vim/emacs fans are excited about it but to me, this type of UIs (text-based) feel old and clunky. it's like we were still using norton/midnight commander for handling our files.

Magit is definitely different enough from both your conventional GUI and command-line interface to make it hard to immediately see its benefits, which is why I did not only post some commented screenshots [1] (which may fail to impress), but also a text [2] which explains in what ways Magit differs from GUIs and command-line interfaces and what sort of benefits it draws from that.

[1] https://emacsair.me/2017/09/01/magit-walk-through/#start [2] https://emacsair.me/2017/09/01/the-magical-git-interface/#st...

A reason why it might actually be an advantage that the interface is "text based" is that the thing the tool interacts with is also text [3]. The primary difference to git is that the "output" is "actionable", the primary difference to GUIs is that every feature of git can be exposed quite naturally.

[3] And a major advantage of that is that the barrier between writing the code and thinking of it in terms of change sets starts to break down.

The point of this kind of UI is that they become an extension of yourself. Saying these UI are old and clunky is exactly like saying a keyboard is old and clunky.

Sometimes 2-clicks can be faster than 2x 3-key combo just to make a feature work and also keyboards are old and clunky, ask any k-12 kid today and they will type faster on touch keyboard than a mechanical cherry-mx powered one. People still using text-based only IDEs for productivity are just prolonging the inevitable.

Only when training is lacking. And I don't mean this in a derogatory message, either. People that are trained with a keyboard are pretty much guaranteed to be faster than folks that have only learned to work with a mouse. Discover, though, will be much much faster with an exploratory interface. To that end, the mouse will lead to faster discovery in most cases.

I came to the same conclusion but I admit I didn't spend too much time looking at it.

I first visited their docs: https://magit.vc/manual/magit.html#Introduction

And saw that it's over 100 pages (printed).

Feels odd punishing a tool for extensive docs. :)

It is powerful, in that it exposes everything of git. However, I doubt most people use most of that. I've found few, for example, know all the flags you can pass log. Magit actually helps fill them with tab completion on path names and such.

Just read the getting started guide, and you are set for most use cases.

It could be that I would only need 10% of this knowledge, I get it. I really wasn't intending to "punish" it, simply stating that over 100 pages of detailed docs for a Git UI can be intimidating.

I meant that in a lighthearted way. I know you aren't actually punishing it. At the same time, I fully understand the intimidation of a giant doc.

I'm just not sure how to actually address that. The big doc is good to have. It is a shame folks land immediately on it.

I use SourceTree mainly for staging and diffs. Git GUI is not that great in that aspect.

Diff's are the only thing I don't like in magit. Well, it's not really magit per se, as it uses another emacs plugins for that.

Staging/unstaging/reverting (specially when you don't want to do that for a whole file but for a chunk) in magit however is so far ahead of every other git interface I've seen that it's not even funny.

SourceTree also lets you stage and unstage/discard hunks in a really nice way.

SourceTree is really fantastic and works on Windows/OSX/Linux. It is free, but you have to "sign up for Atlassian License key" or something like that.

Are you sure SourceTree works on Linux? I couldn't find any reference to that or a way to download the Linux version.

My fault I was probably wrong (or maybe they removed support?). I was on Linux before switching to OSX and I don't remember changing my Git client.

Can't edit my parent comment though now :/

Used to use Atlassian's SourceTree, major slowdowns and lack of a native merge conflict resolution tool had us pleasantly surprised when we first heard of GitKraken: https://www.gitkraken.com/

A year later after discovering Kraken, we've now migrated to it and the developer experience has been great.

SourceTree is a great example for how to destroy a software. The first version was great and showed a good understanding of how to work with git. Then it seems other devs took over and just messed it up completely. Pretty sad.

GitKraken is on Electron (not a good thing) and has to be one of the sluggiest clients I've ever used actually. Try Tower or Fork.

IntelliJ's git UI is the best I've seen.

It's really easy.

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