Hacker News Reader

Comment by brabel | Hacker News Reader

Ok, let me try.

I prefer IntelliJ's git interface.

Magit can do everything IJ can, but in IJ, I can find how to do things more easily and it just feels easier to do things, probably because it's much more GUI than text compared to Magit. For example, difficult merges are extremely easy in IntelliJ, I can edit code in the diff view itself while I resolve conflicts... in Magit it requires getting used to the different diff views, something I am still trying to figure out, but it seems trickier to do "in-place" changes in the code.

That said: I probably only prefer IJ because I've been using it much longer than I have used Magit... and the difference for me is very small, so I suspect the more I use Magit, the more the gap will close and I may eventually like it even more than IJ.

View on HN

IntelliJ's git interface is basically the only way I can use git, or at the very least pull off anything other than the most standard tasks.

Its UI for resolving merge conflicts is so intuitive and powerful. You get 3 panels: local changes on the left, remote changes on the right, and merged in the middle. It's got colored highlighting going across from each of the side to the middle, showing where the changes want to go to, and you click arrows to accept/dismiss left or right, and sometimes it'll even have a suggestion for a way to take both of the changes (indicated by a magic wand). And you can also just type into the center editor if you want to not use either side, and manually rewrite the resolved change yourself, whether that be copy-pasting from each side or whatever you want to do.

It's saved me so many times, it's practically worth the cost of the entire IDE on its own.

IntelliJ GIT ui/ux is so completely frictionless it's magical at times. The only downside is that it makes incredibly complex operations trivial that I never learned git from the cli beyond the very basics.

Really? I tried it yesterday from within Rider and I gave up on it because I couldn't even figure out how to push or pull. Best I could find was fetch.

Not the biggest deal since neither of those commands require interacting with the output which makes them equally easy to run from the terminal, but it's strange that they're not available in an immediately obvious place.

Ctrl-T for pull, Ctrl-Shift-K for push.

You can customize the menu (and I do) to add a Git menu sub panel (for lack of a better word) that has an up and down arrow for push and pull.

In the lower right, there's the vcs "where you're at" that shows the current branch. From there you can see the status of your branch compared to others (if you need to fetch them), or you can update branches (even those you're not currently on) along with branch specific operations including push. You can access the same in the git panel with right clicking on branches in the log.

At any time, you can double tap shift to bring up the "search everything" window. Within that, if you type "git push", it will display that action along with the menu that action is in and any key shortcuts that are bound to it.

Oh wow I didn't know that search everything in Jetbrains products included the menus and not just the contents of the project. That's handy to know. I've been a fan of Ctrl-Shift-P in Sublime Text, so it's always good to see similar features in other software.

Double-shift can show too much, to find only actions try `Cmd+Shift+A` and type the name of the action you want to run.

I've used it for the "where is that show whitespace menu setting? meh... shift shift whitespace. Change setting."

Also, glance under the "Help" menu - there's a productivity guide. That shows you a whole bunch of features (and how often they're used) and how to use them.

Others mentioned the shortcuts, but there's also obvious buttons in the toolbar with a green up-arrow for commit+push (the button for Commit has an option to also Push) and a blue down-arrow for pull.

Maybe you disabled the git toolbar in the menu?

IntelliJ is amazing, and I'd love to have a standalone version of its git frontend for my slower machines.

https://youtrack.jetbrains.com/issue/IDEA-152437

There's a little bit of discussion on it.

Being able to edit the diff directly in the status buffer would be a great additional feature in magit!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com