[mschulze]

I use magit daily for over 8 years now. Over that time I have showed it to many other peers, out of excitement for a tool that made me more productive and helped me learn - but I never could convince even one to use it. Maybe it's my persuasion skills, maybe tool usage is too personal - I don't know, but it makes me kind of sad. The UX of magit is just out of this world.

Especially for rebasing, subset rebases (using --onto, see https://git-scm.com/book/en/v2/Git-Branching-Rebasing#_more_...) are a breeze with Magit. I can't remember the order of branches to use on the CLI, in Magit it's just "r s" basically. It's really magic.

[lambda]

Magit is absolutely the best Git GUI ever.

Unfortunately, for most people the fact that it's part of Emacs is a blocker.

And because most people use worse Git tools, they tend to use workflows that are easier with more cumbersome tools; generally just committing all kinds of junk commits to a branch, and using the "squash and merge" feature of GitHub or GitLab to clean everything in a PR/MR up into a single commit.

So yeah, it's sad that people don't use Git to its full potential because almost no other Git interface works as well, and most people aren't going to learn Emacs just for a Git UI.

[znpy]

> Unfortunately, for most people the fact that it's part of Emacs is a blocker.

OT but i've learned the hard way not to push people into emacs.

a few years ago i made the very stupid mistake of pushing some colleague to trying/learning emacs and then i found myself having to explain the same person everything as well as fix his elisp code from his ~/.emacs .

Reality is, i didn't want to have that role and that colleague wasn't interested in gnu emacs in the first place.

That was a very stupid mistake on my side.

Nowadays i just say things like "yeah it's magit, an emacs plugin" or "ah yeah, it's nice because you spend some time learning it and then you can bring it over from company to company, no licenses involved or other annoyances".

Some people are intrigued, most other absolutely aren't... And it's fine.

[kqr]

Surely the mistake here is conflating "learning Magit" with "learning Emacs"? I can run Java applications while knowing nearly nothing about the JVM. The same is true for applications based on Emacs.

[tsimionescu]

Magit is not an "application based on Emacs", it's an extremely powerful git plugin for someone who is already using Emacs. If you're not using Emacs, it would be crazy to fire up Magit just to do a git commit or rebase. Even the fact that you'd have to learn Emacs' extremely idiosyncratic keyboard shortcuts, and even keyboard shortcut help (what do you mean "save is C-x C-s?" what does that even mean?) is a huge problem not worth the effort.

And I'm saying this as someone who has exclusively programmed in Emacs with Magit for the last 5 years in my job.

[kqr]

> If you're not using Emacs, it would be crazy to fire up Magit just to do a git commit or rebase.

What makes you say that?

> what do you mean "save is C-x C-s?" what does that even mean?

Magit never asks you to C-x C-s save anything. Magit has its own independent set of discoverable keybinds.

[steve1977]

One does not simply use Emacs.

[worik]

I simply used Emacs for 25 years, avoiding editing .emacs entirely

Only in the past years have I started customizing it

My attraction to Emacs is stability and I can use it in text or GUI mode.

Many editors have come and gone in that time, many employers insist I use this or that piece of over designed, under done GUI. When I have the chance, back to Emacs

[imiric]

Peculiarly, having used Emacs for a decade as my main editor, and Git for much more than that, I never could get used to Magit.

Maybe it's due to muscle memory from my CLI Git setup (nothing special, just some aliases, scmpuff, delta, etc.), or Magit forcing you into its own quirky UI, but it never clicked for me. For 99% of things I use Git for, I don't have any issues with my workflow, nor wish to improve it. For the other (very) rare occasions, I can always ask an LLM to help me figure out the right command.

This is also why I don't see any value in Jujutsu either, or any of the GUI/TUI wrappers. The Git CLI porcelain with some minor customizations just hasn't been a problem I need solving.

[w4rh4wk5]

I've looked at Magit and indeed Emacs is a blocker as it's not something I'd like to pick up and maintain. I am using Fork as my primary Git GUI and am pretty happy with it. Lazygit and tig cover the few use-cases which Fork does not cover.

[zelphirkalt]

I am not someone to recommend VSCode, but if you are already using it, you could check out edamagit. I think in the Vim world there is also some equivalent.

[MobileVet]

Run spacemacs in ‘evil mode’ so you can use Vim!

[moritzwarhier]

Personally, I'm not a Git magician, but I prefer the Git CLI for most operations.

Only exception is resolving conflicts.

The most important point for every gut IDE integration to me is that it cleanly maps to the file system and CLI state.

[mr_mitm]

Staging single lines or hunks is also much easier in a TUI/GUI. I wouldn't even know how to do it with just git.

[stackbutterflow]

git add -p

[kirici]

Operates on hunks, which may at times be multiple lines that cannot be split further

[yacin]

oftentimes splitting the hunks with `s` is enough.

[throw-the-towel]

You can edit a hunk with `e`. Clunky but it works.

[saila]

Good tools can improve your workflow for sure, but it's easy enough to keep a clean history with a handful of git commands. There are two main reasons people don't do so: 1. they don't know the commands yet or 2. they just don't care (and are in an environment where there's no incentive to care).

The kind of person who would try a tool like Magit and use it to discover git would have found a different route if Magit didn't exist. The type of person who doesn't care isn't going to learn something just because a tool is available.

[badsectoracula]

> Magit is absolutely the best Git GUI ever.

But it isn't graphical :-P.

Personally i've been often looking for an opensource Git GUI front end but couldn't find anything i'd like. My points of reference of decent tools -ignoring the underlying tech- are Perforce and TortoiseSVN under Windows and Fuel[0] (for Fossil) and KDESVN under Linux.

Perforce and Fuel are the two i like the most, followed by KDESVN and Tortoise. But since i'm on Linux and i stick with opensource projects, Perforce and Tortoise are out, leaving me with Fuel and KDESVN. I'm using KDESVN for a few projects where i don't care about external collaboration and want to store many binary files (which Subversion does it better that Git IMO), though KDESVN is very primitive and limited in what it supports (it doesn't support shelving at all, for example - in fact for anything beyond commit and checking the history you probably need to use the cli tool). I do not use Fossil much nowadays but i used it a lot in the past so i have a bunch of repositories in it, for which i use Fuel. Fuel is unfortunately not being developed anymore, though since it is opensource it doesn't matter much (which is a reason why i ignore anything non-opensource, i know there are some decent proprietary Git clients but for me they might as well not exist).

I think at some point i'll grab libgit2 and make something using Lazarus, probably something similar to Fuel. Unlike libsvn, which seems to be made in hell, libgit2 seems very sane and shouldn't be terribly hard to make something usable out of it.

In the meanwhile i use a combination of git cola, gitgui and gitk though they all feel like a hodgepodge of barely thought random features thrown in together (and i hate that they all want to impose their own idea of how i should format a message -especially git cola- which of course aren't identical between of them and aren't even close how i'd like to format the messages myself).

https://fuel-scm.org/fossil/index

[publicdebates]

https://github.com/magit/magit/issues/3961

[0x1ceb00da]

> Magit is absolutely the best Git GUI ever

Not even close. Claude and codex are the best git gui.

[troupo]

The best gut GUI is GitUp: https://gitup.co/

Magit is not even close to be on the same level.

Any insane operation you want at your fingertips.

[jbstack]

It's Mac-only. That's a pretty serious limitation for a modern Git tool.

[ileonichwiesz]

Isn’t this just something that any IDE has built-in these days? Maybe I’m missing something, but how is this fundamentally different from the built-in git timeline view from something like VSCode or Jetbrains?

[troupo]

> Isn’t this just something that any IDE has built-in these days?

In most IDEs I feel that Git integration is an awkward badly integrated afterthought. They are also very much tied to the whatever IDE offers them in terms of available shortcuts, layouts, controls etc. (this applies to Magit, too).

Some of my idiosyncratic usage I developed with GitUp doesn't even exist in most (all?) Git tools: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47329489 (see my most common workflow)

[MainlyMortal]

I upvoted you because you were unfairly downvoted. I don't even use a Mac any more after 20 years of exclusively using them but it's actually hilarious how bad magit is compared to this. It's all well and good making the most of limitations that are self imposed but people need to remember to look outside their own bubble.

[znpy]

> I don't even use a Mac any more after 20 years

So the software is mac-only, you haven't used a mac in over 20 years so you haven't used this software and yet... you claim it's better than magit?

i mean, it's very dishonest at best.

[BeetleB]

> you haven't used a mac in over 20 years

Not what he said. You misparsed.

[troupo]

The claim was that its GUI is better than Magit's, following this claim: "Magit is absolutely the best Git GUI ever."

[lambda]

It may be prettier looking. I've seen many Git GUIs that are prettier than Magit.

But none of them that I've tried have ever come close to the workflow.

I can stage and unstage individual hunks, do complex interactive rebases, squash commits, break apart commits, etc. much faster in Magit than I can in other Git GUIs.

Maybe you're hung up on the "G" part; perhaps I should have just said "UI" rather than "GUI".

So no, I haven't tried that one because it's Mac only, but I'm not really seeing from the screen recordings the kind of workflow that I find so powerful in Magit.

[masklinn]

I personally don’t care for rebasing in magit (I actually find it confusing when hitting conflicts).

My primary reason for using it is reviewing and staging commits. The non-linear staging with line granularity (which also lets you revert changes at the same time) is so, so very good when you care about crafting commits.

[mschulze]

Right - actually, for conflicts I switch to IntelliJ.

[taude]

I used to use Magit, but once I discovered LazyGit four years ago, I never looked back. No Emacs bloat and a great TUI-based UX with quick single key press actions.

[ziml77]

This is what I need to be sold on magit over. Magit just feels slower (and definitely is slower to start if you're not already in emacs) and less intuitive.

[jwr]

> I never could convince even one to use it

Most people think it's "just another interface on top of git" — without several in-depth examples it's difficult to realize that it actually allows you to complete really complex tasks quickly. I've seen this superficial take many times.

[sureglymop]

It looks really cool but the thing is, having learned git just as a cli tool, I don't think any UI would convert me from that workflow.

The exception is maybe diffing, where I just use meld as the difftool.

[rgoulter]

I think you're missing out on magit.

With magit, the routine git tasks are very fast & flowing, git becomes highly discoverable, and complex tasks are made easy.

For example of things that are tedious on the CLI: magit makes it easy to make "--fixup" commits (since you can select the commit you intend to fix up). Or if you want to use something like git-absorb, that's also easy in magit.

Or magit makes it easy to stage/unstage line by line.

[zelphirkalt]

Same experience here. Showed it to coworkers, but none was interested in making their tooling work well. Even looking for a VSCode equivalent for them (edamagit) no one was even willing to try. Yet people complained about many branches in repos, which didn't impact me at all, but for their GUI git clients apparently were a problem, and so we switched to deleting branches upon merge, discarding some git history along with that (when something was merged).

[e40]

My exact experience, though I did learn it from a co-worker, so at least he did succeed. :)

[jayd16]

What makes something easier in magit than, for example, SmartGit?

[mschulze]

I haven't used SmartGit, so I can't really compare.

I would single out the following for Magit:

1. Single key strokes for actions and toggles 2. Discoverability through "slide-ins" (TFA also explains this)

For 2, this means I press "c" for commit, this opens a popup showing me the next keypresses and what they do. So I can build up muscle memory for commands I know that are fast due to 1, and I can discover options that might help me due to 2.

If I don't know what to do at all, there's Ctrl+c, Ctrl+c to discover "entry-points" for Magit shortcuts.

[zelphirkalt]

I would also highlight that in Emacs magit one can always drop back to command line by pressing "!", which I do, when I don't know how to do something in Magit. Like "git submodule update --init --recursive".

[plieber]

Magit feels very efficient to many developers because it is essentially a thin layer over Git itself. If you already know Git commands and work comfortably inside Emacs, Magit lets you trigger many operations extremely quickly using short key sequences. In that sense it is very close to the mental model of Git.

However, that efficiency comes with a prerequisite: you need to remember commands, understand Git concepts well, and work inside a keyboard driven environment.

SmartGit focuses on a different kind of efficiency. Instead of optimizing for memorizing commands, it optimizes for visual understanding and discoverability. Complex operations like rebasing, resolving conflicts, working with multiple repositories, or managing submodules become easier because the state of the repository is immediately visible and actions are guided.

So the difference is less about what Git can do and more about how quickly a developer can understand and control what is happening.

Magit is extremely powerful for experienced Emacs users who prefer command driven workflows. SmartGit aims to make advanced Git workflows accessible, transparent, and safe for a much broader range of developers.

[erksa]

Same, emacs being the barrier for most.

[Perz1val]

I'll never touch any git wrapper, because they've lied to me before and I can use git already. Everything that was there to be sped up has already been made into zsh functions.