git-cola VS magit

> Visual Studio does a decent job of abstracting the GIT nuances, but I personally use GIT Extensions, which looks and feels much better on Windows than the other cross platform UIs.

IDEs and text editors sometimes have nice Git integrations in the UI, but I wanted standalone software that I can use for anything from various programming projects, to something like gamedev projects (with Git LFS) or arbitrary documents.

In the end, I just forked over some money for GitKraken, it's pretty good, especially with multiple accounts on the same platforms, when you want to switch between them easily: https://www.gitkraken.com/

There's also Sourcetree which I used before then, kind of sluggish but feature complete: https://www.sourcetreeapp.com/

For something more lightweight, I also enjoyed Git Cola on various OSes: https://git-cola.github.io/ Even Git documentation has a page on the software out there, a good deal of which is free and has good platform support: https://git-scm.com/downloads/guis

Quite frankly, I spend like 90% of the time using a GUI interface nowadays, when I want to easily merge things, or include very specific code blocks across multiple files in a commit, or handle most of the other common operations. Of course, sometimes there's a need to drop down to the CLI, but you're right that some GUI software feels like it actually improves the usability here.

I think Git can be a pretty pleasant experience for most folks, as long as you use the basic features and maybe even consider a GUI, anything from Git Cola (free: https://git-cola.github.io/), to something like GitKraken (paid for all features: https://www.gitkraken.com/).

Curiously, the latter also let me setup different accounts that I can switch between with a simple dropdown, which was otherwise annoying when you have Gitea, GitHub, GitLab and others to manage, way easier than https://docs.github.com/en/account-and-profile/setting-up-an...

Either way, suddenly you see the graph of your repo and most of the common actions are a click away, you can just let your brain idle and think about other things you're doing instead, in addition to that working really well with staging chunks of your code, or individual files, cherrypicking and so on.

Then again, personally I prefer squashing in merge/pull requests instead of rebasing, or even just doing regular merge commits and leaving the history as is (which doesn't really scale, but I haven't gotten to the point where that matters that much), so how I use Git won't work for everyone.

> We now have a large selection of tools that allow you to visualize what's going on (I use git-kraken), as well as google for help on doing something that isn't in muscle memory.

Git Kraken is excellent, though Git has a page on various GUIs, many of which are free with no restrictions: https://git-scm.com/downloads/guis

Personally, on Windows I like SourceTree: https://www.sourcetreeapp.com/

Some that have worked with SVN back in the day like TortoiseGit: https://tortoisegit.org/

On *nix Git Cola seems to do the job for me: https://git-cola.github.io/

Then again, the most complex workflow I've worked with was Git Flow and I didn't need anything more advanced than that. Come to think of it, I don't really do rebases often either and mostly just take advantage of squashing commits through GitLab/Gitea and such, when needed.

But hey, that's also valid, using Git in a way where you get version control but mostly keep the technical details out of your way (though Git LFS and certain cases with particular line endings being needed does make you drop down occasionally).

Try git cola. It's not the slickest but it scratches my pointy/clicky desires for git pretty well.

If you can tolerate a GUI, Git Cola might be a solution. I'm using it exclusively for some 5 years now – it's lightweight enough, but still makes you think about what you're about to commit. You can add things to .gitignore directly from there, too.

https://git-cola.github.io/

Default layout is pretty barebones, here's what I'm doing instead: https://u.ale.sh/my-git-cola-screenshot.png

i still don't know how to split one commit into multiples (without going insane (if it's even possible)) without a gui like https://github.com/git-cola/git-cola, and that should be a simple operation (especially with git's "split every change into individual commits make it easier to cherry pick" conventions)

Then the slowness that you're seeing is probably Windows-specific, and that's why everyone else is telling you that Magit is actually fast.

WSL might make things faster.[1] IIUC, the problem is that starting new processes is much slower on Windows than on Linux/Unix and Magit relies heavily on that. This seems to have plagued Git tooling more generally but maybe this got fixed since then.[2]

[1] https://emacs.stackexchange.com/a/58444

[2] https://github.com/magit/magit/issues/2395#issuecomment-1710...

You'll want to invest the time in learning Magit, which will change your life once you get the hang of it (and I was a heavy user of Fugitive in Vim previously!), and it's unlikely you'll find a better integration with GDB anywhere else on the planet than with Emacs, though I can't say that empirically. You just need to take the plunge and start learning it, then cut over and take the hit in productivity one day when you're feeling adventurous. You'll ultimately become far more powerful than you've ever been. Especially if you delve into elisp over time. I use Spacemacs, which is bloated and has bugs, but it has so many features that I haven't undertaken the massive endeavor to replace it from scratch yet.

> Even in this article just a few sentences after stating we should start from first principles he then jumps into the assumption of the "desktop".

Agree. Although I can see how the idea of "first principles" can be a very difficult starting point. A blank sheet of paper is a scary monster.

There's a huge breadth and depth of non-"desktop" GUIs out there, some (like smartphones) are even wildly successful. It's good to explore them for inspiration. Some of my favourites:

- Arcan (https://arcan-fe.com/about/) - I won't attempt to summarize, just dive in!

- SailfishOS (https://sailfishos.org/) - mobile UI focused on interaction through gestures / swipes; I've used it as my daily driver for a couple years.

- Speaking of mobiles, classic Nokia UIs allowed you to navigate to a specific item in the menu by pressing the corresponding digit on the dial pad. Once you learned where a particular item is, accessing e.g. your SMS inbox was extremely quick.

- Apple Watch / WatchOS (https://www.apple.com/watchos/) - I've always loved the idea of a device where one of the primary interaction methods was a wheel/dial of some sort. The watch even gives you context-sensitive tactile feedback.

- ZUIs in general (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zooming_user_interface) and the work of Jef Raskin in particular: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archy_(software) - this is the guy who helped design the Macintosh, but his other work took a radically different route.

- Magit (https://magit.vc/). Many common git operations are reduced to a couple of keystrokes; the obscure features are more discoverable, and the cumbersome procedures (such as rebasing, or staging individual hunks) become simple and intuitive. Also check out transient (https://github.com/magit/transient), which is the "UI toolkit" that powers Magit.

This can be done most comfortably with org-mode in emacs. It offers a lot of features, and they all operate on plain text. There are also nice integrations for git and languagetool, but I guess those are less exclusive.

How does this differ from https://magit.vc/ ?

I would rather see innovative tools that lessen our dependency on 50+ year old tech. This is still a glorified teletype. It uses AI to autosuggest git commands? Contrast with Magit[1], which (while it has a tiny bit of a learning curve, but also nowhere near 23M in funding) actually makes interacting with git a pleasure.

[1]: https://magit.vc

Also was using Emacs (org-mode)[https://orgmode.org] for years with (Magit)[https://magit.vc] package for git. I feel org-mod is a precursor to Roam Research, Obsidian, et al. Hit the spot for years but I wanted editing on mobile so that’s why I’m here. :)