Magit

Incredible tool. I've been using it every day for years now and can't imagine using git without it. The speed with which I can stash/unstash, switch branches, rebase, cherry pick or selectively stage is incredible. It's like riding a bicycle rather than walking.

BTW, if you use and appreciate magit, please subscribe and contribute financially (yes, I do that). We shouldn't expect great tools to be maintained and developed for free.

I'm surely in the minority here. I've been using Emacs for almost a decade now, but I just can't get into the Magit workflow. I've tried several times, but always end up going back to Git on the command line. I have dozens of aliases, shell integrations, a nice diff viewer[1], etc., and interacting with Git has become muscle memory. I can commit, cherry-pick, rebase, bisect, fix conflicts, etc., in a fraction of the time it would take me to navigate Magit's UI. I'm sure with enough practice, a Magit user could do this more quickly and efficiently, but honestly, with some custom-built porcelain, Git's UI is not so bad. Though this could very well be Stockholm syndrome after using it for such a long time...

For whatever reason, Magit's opinionated workflows never clicked with me. A part of it is the concern that it will do something weird to my repo that I'll then have to waste more time undoing manually. I usually don't trust sugary wrappers around tools. And another is the fact I don't use Emacs on all machines, and setting up Git on a remote system is just a matter of copying over my config and some shell integrations.

Also, on a more personal note, I find the cultish fanboyism whenever Magit is brought up slightly offputting. Does anyone have anything bad to say about it? No software can realistically be this infallible. :)

[1]: https://github.com/dandavison/delta

In my experience it's pretty rare that a frontend comes along and fundamentally changes my workflow around the underlying tool, but Magit falls into that category for me. Truly a great piece of software.

I love magit and I use it basically every day. But lately, at my work's monorepo, I've been greatly pained by how synchronous it is (like much of Emacs). When I want to fix a unit test, I find suspicious commits by a grep for some keyword through diffs in the git log, and unlike the git CLI, magit will not show me any matching commits until it has searched through all of them (capped at 256 matches by default), which takes a very long time. I love so many creative Emacs tools, but the wait times from magit and consult get painful.

Love magit. I recommend using it with magit-delta https://github.com/dandavison/magit-delta for the syntax highlighting.

For neovim users, there's a work-in-progress clone, neogit: https://github.com/timUntersberger/neogit/

Some of my colleagues use emacs/magit, and after seeing how absolutely lovely the workflow is, I've put in a lot of work over the last few months expanding it. You can check out my fork here: https://github.com/ckolkey/neogit/

One thing I particularly like to tease my emacs' colleagues about is that my magit is faster than theirs thanks to neovim's async capabilities.

I got so used to staging individual lines instead of files — it’s so much more intuitive! With „s“ and „u“ I sift through my edits and discard any debug code that I haven’t checked-in accidentally for a long time. Magit also speeds up cycle management of dev branches so much. It‘s usually just a couple of single key strokes — pretty cool.

But I would say, you really have to have drank the Emacs Koolaid to appreciate Magit‘s greatness.

That being said it’s only after I discovered Magit I also started to appreciate Emacs‘ built-in version control mode: The same key combo „C-x v n“ (Versioning Next step) does initialize a repo and checks in files with any kind of backend (be it git, mercurial or subversion). That’s pretty neat, too. With „C-x v l“ I access „git log“ for any file where I can access diffs or visit an older version of the file in a separate buffer e.g. to try out an older implementation of a function. „C-x v g“ gives me a „git blame“ integration jumping straight to the line I was hovering on.

So for exploring git logs I am using vc-mode but staging and branching I am leveraging Magit. They complement each other well.

I've been using lazygit and it's amazing. I used to use magit and I think it's great but lazygit seems to have an easier learning curve and is trying to accomplish the same thing (easy reach to the most common git actions).

I'd like to plug [tig](https://github.com/jonas/tig) for those who don't use emacs. I see lazygit recommended here too, but I've been using tig for years now and love it's simplicity.

Magit made git usable for me. It's both intuitive to use and powerful (at least compared to my needs).

How to pronounce it? Any way you want, it seems. https://magit.vc/manual/magit/How-to-pronounce-Magit_003f.ht...

I switch between magit while on emacs/coding and lazygit while on terminal... I love them both for staging/amend/cherry-pick etc....

I’d heard it was worth it even if you don’t use eMacs. Spend half a day trying to figure out how to install and just gave up.

I love that use of the VC domain. Refreshing.

There's a great magit plugin for VS Code: https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=kahole.m...