GitKraken - The tool I can't git without

We have all been there at the beginning of learning git - jumping through courses and blogs, reading documentation, trying to learn commands by heart, practising etc. I was there too, struggling to get a grip of what git actually is and how it works. I am willing to present you GitKraken, the tool which will save you an unimaginable amount of time which you would have spent on re-reading git documentation or strolling through some git cheat-sheets.

This tool is amazing and I cannot enjoy it enough. It provides all the features git has to offer in just a click away. It has a beautiful colorful representation of the branches and their flow, as well as a toolbar with all the commands you constatly use.

It also has a sidebar to view all your existing local and remote branches, and offers all of the necessary options you need to work with them.

My favorite part of using this git tool: The diff view. It feels so empowering to be able to see the changes in the repo with a neat diff tool. This is another thing that GitKraken offers. It offers three different diff views, one of which lets you discard od stage only chunks of a modified file, you can clearly see who has worked on these changes and list all the files which have been modified. Besides this it has a very similar and interactive conflict resolver GUI as well.

Additionally, GitKraken has some other features called GloBoards and Timelines (NEW), which you can use for issue tracking or project/task management and tracking current milestones. It is also a part of the Student Developer Pack, from which as a student you can get a free PRO account for a whole year.

I very much recommend using this tool to everyone who is working with git on a daily basis and does not feel as cool about manually typing commands in the terminal as in the beginning. You can read more about GitKraken here

Thanks for reading!

Comments

[ItsASine (Kayla)]

I've had this through Github Student for a while now and convinced the guys at work to use the free version for day-to-day use.

Pros:

• Pull non-checked out branches (IntelliJ's git won't let me do that which sucks when rebasing)
• THE COLORS -- So easy to visualize where things live
• Bolds pull requests assigned to you (and you can double click it to check out the relevant branch)

Cons:

• I can't live down the time I was setting it up and deleted develop over Christmas because there's a subtle but important difference between "Are you sure you want to delete develop?" and "Are you sure you want to delete origin/develop?"

[Rafal Pienkowski]

Maybe I'm too old-fashioned, but I prefer to use gitcli 😉

[Manuka Maduranga]

Any differences between this and GIT Desktop?

[Damjan Dimitrov]

GitKraken supports many other popular git hosting platforms such as Gitlab or Bitbucket, I believe Git Desktop is a client for Github only? If you compare GitKraken with other git clients perhaps there is not a huge difference on the tools but I prefer it for its epic GUI.

[Dina]

GitHub Desktop works with any got repository. I've used it with GitHub, gitlab, bitbucket.

[Matthew McAdams]

I use GitKraken to squash commits on local before pushing to GitHub. It's much easier than using the command line but can't be done with Git Desktop

[Marco Carrozzo]

actually, they changed the payments plans and now the free version doesn't work anymore with private repositories. quite unpleasant.

[Joel Turner]

Love it! I've been a pro user for a couple of years and have been very happy with it.