[warbiscuit]

That's a good example of where I think a gui has an advantage.

For the example I gave, unless the hunks were asymetrically distributed, `git add -p` would require pressing "n" 20 times to skip through the excluded hunks (among other things), even when the user could visually see all the hunks, and know which ones they wanted. Where as gui would only require the clicks to select the "y" hunks.

I realize this is arguing a difference in the efficiency, not capability, of the UIs; but that's basically my point. The use-cases where one or the other is optimal are too closely situated together in the problem space to say one is inherently the better choice, even for VCS tasks.

While command line interaction may allow the user to receive a whole screen's worth of information at once, it forces them to interact with it in a serial fashion, regardless of whether out-of-order interaction with on-screen elements would allow them to complete the task faster.

[jcrites]

I tend to use Git primarily at the command line as well. I recently saw a colleague use an advanced IDE (I think it was IntelliJ IDEA) to perform a complex `git add -i` with staging individual hunks in multiple files. He did it quite a lot faster in his GUI than I could at the command line. His IDE displayed the files he was staging, with full syntax highlighting for the programming language, and background highlighting showing the lines being modified.

He quickly paginated through the file and just by clicking with his mouse was able to stage and unstage hunks. He had a neat side-by-side view with two panes of text showing the current text and staged commit, if I recall correctly. The IDE instantly showed if this would result in syntax errors, and could even automatically run the project build and tests.

`git add -i` and `git add -p` can do this, but it's much more clunky and serial and modal. For example, my colleague could easily scroll up and down the files, staging and unstaging hunks as needed. He could easily see which files in his file explorer needed this processing and switch between them. This information was all displayed on the screen at the same time, contextually, and the GUI enables navigation to any point in this workflow instantaneously with a click or scroll.

I don't tend to have to do this kind of operation very much, and I'm comfortable doing them from the CLI, so I haven't bothered to set up this GUI tool. But I've seen that GUI tools for tasks like this are faster. Anything involving editing the actual text of files or diffs of them will likely be faster in a GUI.