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Comment by zdw | Hacker News Reader

I wonder how much further along git would be on Windows if it had run better on that platform historically, and had a better GUI.

The Mac numbers don't surprise me at all, as the large influx of unix people to the platform are more used to using CLI tools.

(yes, I'm saying that on the whole, Mac users are less afraid of the CLI than Windows users. Shocker!)

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Yes, GIT is way more hassle than it should be. I hate that it depends on cygwin and msysgit is a great start but still a little alien feeling.

I disagree with the blanket statement about Mac users. Developers using Mac are not Mac users by a long shot. For most of us I know it is a case of the Mac being a better *nix dev box than the alternatives.

I agree that many developers on Macs aren't traditional Mac users, but disagree that OSX is a better Unix. I'd say it's an ok-to-good Unix, but one where sound, copy and paste, and wireless networking all work--and that it's these that compensate for other shortcomings as compared to Linux or FreeBSD.

I witched to Mercurial about a year ago. Before that, I used Subversion, and I used it only through the gui tools.

But when switching to Mercurial, the gui tools weren't as good, so I learned how to use it via the command line. And, to my surprise, I found that it's much easier to use the command-line rather than the gui tools. Everything goes much faster.

So if you're a Windows dev, like me, and have never tried solely using the command-line tools before, I suggest you give it a shot. You may be surprised like I was.

tortoisegit improved by leaps and bounds in the last 18 or so months. it's quite feature-complete. i suggest checking it out even if you've been bitten by it in the past.

Actually, I use Git on Mac and I switched because of GitX. I don't consider the CLI a legitimate interface personally.

Don't consider it a legitimate interface? Really? It's the interface git was designed for.

I find it way easier to visualize a diff in a gui. That's primarily what GitX brings to the party. For almost any feature other than git log and git commit, you still need to hit the CLI.

(I DO think this means there's a great deal of potential profit available to someone who releases a GREAT git gui for OS X)

http://www.kernel.org/pub/software/scm/git/docs/git-difftool...

Personally, I use vimdiff.

XCode 4 has some nice features (git is now first class), you can read a bit here http://developer.apple.com/technologies/tools/whats-new.html...

You probably aren't our target market (people new to Git) - but we are working on Git UI for OSX aimed at making the most common commands easy to perform. http://gitmacapp.com/download

My VCS of choice has Qt-based GUI flavours of almost all commands on windows, OS X and Linux. The only ones I ever use are annotate, log, diff and occasionally commit.

What is it you'd want from a "Great Git GUI"?

I'm a big fan of git diff --color-words, it's basically sent me back to the command line.

I see that that wasn't clearly written. What I meant was "I don't consider a CLI to be a legitimate interface (in general)". Obviously Git's is "legit" because, as you say, that's how it was designed. But I'm against such designs.

You can't use Git completely without a GUI [1] and not having everything in a GUI means I'm forever typing some command and then typing another command (or several) to make sure what I expect is actually what happened. To "visualize", if you will. In a GUI I could just see it and this would save a lot of time.

[1] Diffs are visual (vi is a GUI). I'm sure some clown will show how it's possible to use ed or something so you can really do everything without a GUI, but the effort that will take demonstrates my point nicely.

The real shocker is that the Mac has a much better CLI than Windows.

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