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Comment by Sleaker | Hacker News Reader

What's the main benefit of using a GUI with git for people? For me it's usually just the ease of not needing to know a commit hash to perform a rebase against after a merge, but I generally just do these ops from within an IDEs builtin git support and everything else is command line. Do others find a huge benefit from GUIs?

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In magit I find invaluable being able to stage chunk by chunk. It enables a whole different workflow, where I review my own code staging it step by step.

Also being able to navigate blame history inside the editor is pretty cool.

No idea about other GUIs, if I have to get out the editor to use git I might just use the command line.

For workflow reviews I tend to just push to GitHub and then use it's review diff when making PRs to catch anything I may have missed (typos usually)

Ah I do use git blame sometimes but it's builtin to the ide so I get it while editing code live. I guess this is the biggest difference I have with not wanting a gitgui, any of those ops I feel like I can get with my ide.

Sure, magit is in some sense "getting it with the ide".

Not sure how advanced is blame in other editors, it's not just blame annotation, is being able to navigate the history of a line just jumping from one change to the previous and back. It's incredibly helpful with large code bases to understand how some code evolved and why it's implemented like that.

Another great magit feature is being able to open a file from any git revision. Like you want to copy some line from a file that's being long removed you can just call magit-find-file on a revision that still has it, open it in buffer, copy what you want etc.

I agree, navigating blame history is incredibly useful, if only to save you from asking the wrong person about a particular change.

Vim's Fugitive[1] can do this and also in Textmate to. So I would hope that most editor git plugins can.

1. https://github.com/tpope/vim-fugitive

`git add -p`

Working often with multi branch projects across repos (forks and upstream), using GitKraken simply makes me more productive. I don't think anymore about how I'm gonna merge or rebase stuff, it makes everything more intuitive. I still use the CLI for advanced stuff that the GUI doesn't handle, but for day to day operation, it's a panacea

Lately I've been using this: https://martinvonz.github.io/jj/v0.10.0/

It's fully compatible with git.

What I used to need a GUI for now I can easily do with jj.

I am perfectly comfortable with CLI git, certainly when measured against my peers, but I still prefer the visual tree, context menus, command palette, etc. I like to right click and edit commit messages. I like to copy branch names. I like to do visual three way merges. I can understand what went wrong more quickly when a PR has unexpected changes. I can see what branches are in origin at a glance. I don’t have to remember the name or hash of anything.

- (un)staging only parts of files instead of whole files

- seeing full content of a branch without checkouting

- seeing diffs between local/remote/stash branches instantly just by Ctrl + mouse click

- automatic stash+reapply local changes when pulling or checkouting branch

- easy using multiple ssh keys (due to multiple remotes)

- easy show/hide parts of tree in (a nice rendered) tree

- just one mouse click to show commit in github (and probably other sites)

etc.

most of them could be done with CLI but it would just be suffering for me

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