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Agree with you. A GUI is fine (and a good thing) as long as it is just for convenience and discoverability, and it doesn't abstract git away, hide its power or try to impose its own workflow.

IMHO, a good git GUI would show exactly what commands are being run (so it is useful as a learning tool) and their result and allow it being used along side the cli.

I use magit extensively and it has all these properties.

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Yeah I heavily recommend magit to anyone who can tolerate Emacs (which is unfortunately a barrier). It's allowed me to discover so many powerful Git features I would otherwise never have used, and provides a very intuitive interface that does exactly what you expect it to do. This is especially true of its wrappers for rebasing and history editing.

As well as smartgit, I only use it for squashing and merging stuff but it shows nice output so I guess you can learn the commands from there doing other stuff as well when you're starting to learn git.

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