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.

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.

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.

> 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

> 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.

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.

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

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.

Right - actually, for conflicts I switch to IntelliJ.

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.