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Comment by karmelapple | Hacker News Reader

Great tool that I use daily.

Interestingly, I recently talked to someone in an interview setting who got asked a question about git, and as soon as the interviewee started saying, "Typically I use SourceTree," the interviewer's demeanor turned sour on asking any further version control questions.

Just because someone uses a GUI for version control doesn't mean they don't understand it... I prefer the way SourceTree makes it very easy and visual to stage portions of a file, and the always-displayed tree makes it very clear how different branching and merging operations are going to happen.

Seemed like some weird attitude against a GUI source control tool... especially one specifically well-designed for a Mercurial or Git workflow.

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"the interviewer's demeanor turned sour"

Weird. I haven't worked in a team where people used the command line for bread-and-butter source control since 1996 or so. IME it's harder (not impossible, but harder) to screw things up with fat fingers using a GUI, and pretty much every time you use SCM you're going to want a good diff view anyway. (We tend to do basic paired code review at commit time.)

It's kind of tragic; I don't think anyone would describe the git UI in flattering terms, but now that it's become a 'pons asinorum' for geek machismo it's almost impossible to replace it.

And I agree, SourceTree is lovely.

I'm a happy SourceTree user as well. I know how to use Git in the terminal but I find SourceTree quicker to use as it lets me quickly visualise what I need to see.

It's interesting to think about. I use SourceTree for 3 things:

- new branches (I find the syntax tedious for some reason, and I like to see where I am in the tree, so I'm already looking at SourceTree's interface when I'm branching) - deleting remote branches (see above about syntax) - awesome diff visualization for past commits and current work

Everything else I do on the command line, because SourceTree requires just a few too many clicks for my liking. It's a shame the terminal can't have a nice diff interface like SourceTree's, otherwise I'd probably be full terminal.

Similarly, I find the GUI quicker when I'm invoking commands I don't use often enough to memorise. I prefer cleaning up commits I'm about to make easier with SourceTree as well; I can browse through the diffs, reverse some changes, ignore some files, delete others then make my commit with minimal fuss.

apt-get install tig

I think that the only excuse for this is when the work environment uses headless servers. Can't tell you how many people are just stuck in GUI when they only knew Windows Servers and than thrown into a Linux server they were helpless.

I think it's important to be able to use both. GUIs are great at viewing diffs and so on, but you do need to know how to use the command line.

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