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Comment by agumonkey | Hacker News Reader

how would you compare it to other git interfaces ? unless you used to use the bare git program in a shell.

It's the best git client I've used, comparing to git (CLI & gitk), PyCharm's builtin (even with the recent improvements e.g. hunkwise selection), tig, Sourcetree, gitx (various forks) and gitextensions.

The rebase and interactive stage/unstage are especially stellar.

It does get a tad slow on huge repositories, but that's the case of most git clients.

Despite using pycharm for $dayjob, most of my interactions with git are through magit. Basically the only ones which are not are annotations-browsing (IDE integration is too convenient there) and branch-switching ($dayjob repo being huge, switching major branches can take some time and magit completely locks up emacs + has no feedback, so CLI is more convenient)

I found my Magit was particularly slow on my OSX Aquamacs instance, and then learned that it was a known performance regression that apparently stemmed from Aquamacs not using vfork on OSX. A one-character source edit and a rebuild, and my Magit was pretty zippy again.

Emacs in particular, and a lot of Unix software in general, run very poorly in Mac OS X compared to Linux or OpenBSD. I had to look up what vfork was, and learned that it was deprecated in POSIX 2008. Not surprising. Mac OS X seems to be in perpetual beta mode, where it is always half-way behind on basic Unix features, and the other half are proprietary interfaces that get deprecated/broken/incompatible changes every major release. Switch to a better operating system.

”Switch to a better operating system”

Even if better Operating Systems exists, there are no better Deskop Environments ;-)

I agree, there is no better desktop environment than Emacs: https://github.com/ch11ng/exwm

I wouldn't consider a desktop environment that forces one to put up with useless transition animations even a good desktop enviroment.

That doesn’t bother me but to each their own.

Yeah, I had to keep rebasing on a rapidly changing branch a couple of years ago, and magit made it a lot less painful than it otherwise would have been.

It's far superior to the intellij integration as they have a generic "version control".

Magit is just so easy to use for discarding hunks / rebasing / etc. Quick, visually clear. I sometimes use emacs just to use magit when working with java on a fiddly git task even when I'm working in intellij to modify the actual code.

this should be sent to the magit team (even if its mostly Jonas these days I believe)

I think at least Jonas is aware of users like that -- there were some discussions on that concept during his Magit Kickstarter campaign[1]:

> Make Magit more accessible to non-Emacs users

> I think that Magit can be an excellent Git interface for users of other editors and IDEs. It would be a shame if its user-base continued to be limited to people who use Emacs for editing purposes.

> To appeal to non-Emacs users, Magit has to be made more accessible. Additionally I intend to provide simplified Emacs configurations and documentation that teaches just enough Emacs to be able to use Magit. See Magit for users of other editors for more information.

[1]: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1681258897/its-magit-th...

Having had tried most git clients (command-line, SourceTree, GH client, Kraken, Fork, IntelliJ built-in and many others), in my opinion Magit beats all of them to the ground.

I used to use Emacs (Spacemacs) as my main IDE - I have since switched to PyCharm/CLion but I still use Spacemacs+Magit as a sort of a standalone git client because nothing else gets close.

Oh, plus, it works beautifully over SSH/X11 in case you need to do any git stuff on a remote box and want a "UI". (terminal version is always there too, of course)

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