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Discussion on: What GIT GUI client do you use?

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Brandon Sarà • • Edited

I prefer the terminal. With git aliases, you can be set for anything you want to do very quickly, like formatting the logs to be all pretty or minimal in the terminal.

However, if i want to visually see large parts of my git history or view several branches simultaneously, I like to use a GUI. For me, lately, that has been Sublime Merge (made by the same guy who made Sublime Text). It works very well and I would highly recommend it.

If you have access to a JetBrains IDE, their git tools are amazing, but I would never run a full IDE just for the git tools. They are great if you already have it open though.

SourceTree is a very nice solution as well and it is what I always recommend to those who are new to git for a few reasons:

  1. It's super easy to use.
  2. It's hard to mess yourself up with it because it will generally warn you before you mess up your repo.
  3. It's a great way to discover the awesome features git provides. Because you have labeled buttons and menu items that are right in front of you as you go about your normal git business, it will make you wonder something like "what is bisect?" and then you know what to learn about/search for to become more familiar with git. (BTW, if you haven't, you should definitely look up "bisect", it's awesome).