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Comment by zalzane | Hacker News Reader

I use gitextensions as well, and could never imagine using CLI. I don't have the patience to type out filenames or read ugly diffs through the console just for the sake of using CLI. On top of that, I'm an extremely slow typer so CLI is almost always a hinderance.

Staging a handful of files for commit in CLI takes maybe 30 or 40 seconds for me, where with gitextensions it takes a handful of clicks, not to mention I can read the changes I made to the file as I stage, which is useful for commit comments.

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I don't have the patience to use a GUI.

The CLI autocompletes git commands, filenames, remotes, branches, tags, anything you can think of simply by pressing tab once. Just press tab twice to see all options for the context, for example list all tags matching a prefix entered.

Staging a handful of files literally takes me a few seconds on the CLI. I constantly use interactive rebase, stash, amends. I could never imagine using a GUI for this.

I also use the cli heavily for the reasons you've listed. I also use vim as my primary editor so the prompt is only a ctrl+z or :sh away.

What I find especially powerful is when reviewing files in the commit window you can stage and commit subsection of files.

It allows you to really quickly separate out different change into unique commits and gets rid of the need to make messy I-did-A-and-then-did-B commits.

Select the lines you want in the commit window -> Right Click -> Stage Lines.

You can also revert selected lines, but for some reason it's grayed out half the time... I'm not sure what black magic controls that feature.

You can do all of that in the CLI but it's a lot more clunky and time consuming.

`git add -p` splits your changes into logical chunks and lets you choose whether to stage each on.

It also lets you edit them (press e on a hunk)! I love that command. And it was clearly inspired by "darcs record". I also use commit-patch[1] quite a lot, it comes with Emacs integration which makes it heavenly (vc-diff then edit the patch to your liking, then commit).

[1] http://porkrind.org/commit-patch/

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