Comment by michaelbuckbee | Hacker News Reader

Comment by michaelbuckbee | Hacker News Reader

The fact that I prefer a GUI for source control management (Tower for Git and Versions for SVN) probably marks me as a lightweight, but I've found them to be valuable for 2 reasons:

1. I write better commit messages when I use them because they spellcheck and it just _seems_ like I ought to use proper punctuation and capitalization.

2. Having a one keystroke / button diff from the previous version offers a good sanity check to myself and helps me catch stupid errors from being committed to source control.

That being said, I still usually end up using a mix of the GUI and command line for some of the other features.

For me, the big win are the source control DAG visualizations. `hg glog`, `git log --graph`, and `tig` are great 80% solutions, but at the end of the day, I strongly prefer the displays provided by MacHG and GitX.

There is really no reason to feel embarrassed because you use a GUI. A terminal is a terrible vehicle to display the complex information that git needs to show you, especially `status`, `diff`, etc...

To me, git GUI's are like IDE's: they make you more productive, so you'd be a fool to ignore them.

As for #1, when you do `git commit` it launches your $EDITOR (at least on GNU/Linux, I've never owned a Mac), which should spellcheck for you.

Yeah, does this on Mac OS X as well. I have it set to currently launch Vim, but in the past I have also had it launch TextMate.

Yup, on OSX I do this:

    export GIT_EDITOR='mvim -f -c"au VimLeave * !open -a Terminal"'

It nicely returns focus to the terminal window that launched MacVim (i.e. Gvim for OSX) after you save and close the commit message.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com