What GUI do you recommend? My experience has been that GUIs are the easiest and fastest way to make a mess that can't be corrected without dropping to CLI or re-cloning. (I'm looking at you SourceTree). I've long recommended that everyone who uses git know how to use the CLI even if they don't use it regularly.
I'd like to also point out tig.
"Tig is an ncurses-based text-mode interface for git"
It doesn't have all the bells and whistles of a GUI, but if you need to look at all the branches, and commits to a repository. tig is an excellent tool. tig doesn't issue any commands though, its only a browser, you'll still need to know the CLI. (essentially a ncurses version of gitk)
I'm normally in a ssh session on a remote box where my compile & run cycles happen. tig is curses based, so no X11 needed, filled in a really nice itch of mine.
The Git GUI that ships with git is very good. It also shows how Git thinks (workspace/staging/commit) that most other gui's struggle with (they try to make it look more like a SVN workflow). For diffs and blame I use TortioseGit. I also extensively use the CLI for most branch actions.
If you're on a mac, I can't recommend Tower enough. It's a paid app but well worth the money. Otherwise Git Kraken is a foss offering that is also excellent.
I want to second that. Also the integration with diff tools like Kaleidoscope is a nice touch. (Even though Kaleidoscope feels like abandonware at this point)
I like it a lot, it make git as simple as mercurial. I don't think it is hiding complexity, but the visual arrangement makes sense. The staging area becomes actually useful, and I love that you can stage (or revert) pieces of a file, which is handy when you forgot to commit one thing before moving on to the next.
I've only had to merge a branch once, and here I was completely confused on what was going end. This may be SourceTree's fault or git's fault. Maybe my lack of understanding.
I hate git, I don't understand git, I don't want to have to understand git, and I think the command line interface makes every UI error in the book. But SourceTree has made me like git.
We have a bunch of projects that are stored in a mercurial repo so I've been using Sourcetree for that as I've found MacHG pretty unusable. I think it's pretty good, not as good in my opinion (the UI, mainly) as Tower for Mac which I use for Git, but makes Mercurial easy to use for this (somewhat) hardened Git user.
I really like Magit, which is a git GUI you can use without leaving Emacs. It handles 90% of my git needs and is very tightly integrated into my IDE (Emacs). I still use some shell commands (like git mv) occasionally but those are simply m-! away.
Second that; I'm using Spacemacs just for Magit and nothing else, although it's mainly vim or clion for development. Haven't seen a single git client that would be close to Magit; too sad it needs Emacs, could have potentially been an awesome standalone...
it covers like 80% of my use-cases (which I use 99% of the time), and weirdly magit gets me the other 20% if I can remember which trail of breadcrumbs I follow through helm to make it happen. For the easier stuff I just drop down into the cli though.
I use TortiseGit in my personal and work dev environments. It works works well. That being said, I have had to drop to CLI to fix things that were somewhat more hairy.
Tortoise was great on Subversion, but I don't like it for Git. The UI in thought to work with a centralized version control is isn't well adapted to Git.
My company uses Mercurial still and TortoiseHg is the best thing about it. I can sling big piles of commits around, patch, graft, and search, it's all so easy. I hope it works as well for Git or Git can catch up.
