[fouric]

The things you mentioned are better when presented visually. Visual representations leverage the visual processing system of the human brain, and for graph-like data are near-objectively superior to linear textual representations.

However, you can approximate visual representations of these things in a CLI - `git log --graph --pretty=oneline --decorate --abbrev-commit` will use ASCII characters to draw the DAG of commits.

Moreover, the GitHub web GUI is not "amazing". It's tolerable as far as web UIs go, but it's missing a lot of keyboard shortcuts (and none of them are customizable), has no built-in extensibility (the fact that you can inject your own scripts and stylesheets is a hack only at the display level, and an impractical one at that), EDIT: isn't scriptable, and is incredibly resource-intensive relative to a native application. The GitHub CLI allows you to manage the non-git parts of GitHub from the command-line (and make your own GitHub native client by extension) - which is desirable, given the above.

[juped]

gitk comes with Git - it's not perfect but it beats ascii art.

I don't think the GH web interface is even tolerable. Even Bitbucket, which really sucks, has a better one...