What is the best git gui client?
There are a lot of options for git gui. Give me some of your recommendations and why. Free and paid options welcomed.
You can see a visual graph, check things out, merge them, resolve conflicts (best diff viewer I've used), stash things, etc., etc. all inside the IDE itself. And integrated support for Github PRs is nice too, though that interface is still a bit young and clunky.
Mostly it's just great to be able to stay in the IDE and not need other tools. Switching between browsing Git and browsing a database and browsing code and editing Markdown all happens in the same IDE.
VScode is pretty darned good these days but IntelliJ still has more features out of the box, and its Git interface is IMO still a bit better than Gitlens.
Fork is an excellent Git GUI for Mac and Windows. It's a paid product, and not open source.
Also, DiffMerge is a useful tool that integrates well with a Git GUI, to visually compare and merge files on Windows, macOS, and Linux.
I have used Jetbrains' IDEs, the CLI with fish+abbreviations+fzf, Git kraken, tig, and SourceTree. I was not an Emacs user and Magit became the gateway drug that led me down that rabbit hole (I now have a 1000+ line literate config). I actually tried to stop using Emacs in order to unify my tooling but I couldn't wean myself off, just makes working with git way too easy for me.
Why is Magit good?
- First, it will appease those who suggest "just do it the CLI way" because Magit's "Transient" interface mostly just maps mnemonic keys to git commands and their respective flags. It does this while providing real-time hints/cheatsheet style documentation so it makes discovering some of git's functionality easier. As an example, if you want to fetch and prune from the command line, you would call `git fetch -p` or `git fetch --prune`. In Magit, just tap `f - p u` and you'll get the same thing. Interactive rebasing is also mostly done the same as doing it the CLI way.
- It has a lot of convenience functions for a lot of the standard git commands. While they might only represent a small percentage of your day-to-day workflow, it's nice when you can use it. For instance, sometimes I do all my "merging back into master" work so I can start a new branch, start working on a new feature, commit, but forgot that I was still on master. Rather than going through the usual hoops of starting a new branch with that commit and resetting master, Magit provides a "spin-off" and with just a few key strokes, your commit is in its own branch and master is back to normal. Commit extend/reword is another example of some of the small niceties that add up.
- It's all text. Some GUIs might have things you want to copy/paste but it's a button or graphical element, making you have to click on something else to make that text interactable. This also makes it pretty fast to work with.
I'm not saying Magit is the best git client, since that will largely depend on what you're looking for in a client, but at least for me it was. Give it a shot, see if you like it.
They also make git lens for vs code which is an amazing tool.