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Comment by therealidiot | Hacker News Reader

Whenever I've tried GUI Git tools I've always found them confusing than the command line Git

In trying to be simple they often left me feeling powerless

Depends on the GUI tool. Some of them do over-simplify things, for example, by omitting the DAG view. This is misleading because it tries to make the source history appear linear when it isn't. GitHub for Windows and Visual Studio's source history both make this mistake, for instance.

Have you tried SourceTree? That's the one I tend to recommend these days. Alternatively, if you're prepared to splash out a bit, SmartGit is worth considering too.

I use a combination of SourceTree and the command line for my workflow, and can heartily recommend it. Some operations are just more intuitive to me when using the GUI such as:

  - staging portions of many files scattered across a directory tree
  - quickly glancing over diffs for a given commit
  - understanding the commit graph and the relationship between local and remote branches

Each developer's experience may vary, but in general I feel like a good GUI tool can help a novice user develop and reinforce the mental model necessary to understand what git is doing. For example, what am I doing when I rebase my commit onto master vs merging it?

Exactly! And the cli is much better for the little workflows around rebase and cherry-pick.

I do much prefer the command line (actually because of its simplicity and directness but that's just my perspective). However, having just trained a team on using git (yes they have only just adopted it!) and finding that the most confusing parts for them were the relation of the working copy to staging to remote then a GUI could have helped.

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