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Comment by Groxx | Hacker News Reader

Literally every git GUI I've used has screwed up a git repository at some point, requiring relatively-advanced CLI use to untangle it. They're wildly untrustworthy IMO. They also almost never perform reasonably on truly large repos, aside from gitk.

Since using a GUI has inevitably required me to learn CLI in depth, and adds the complexity of figuring out what the hell the GUI actually did because of course it doesn't tell you, I'm basically 100% CLI as well.

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One of the largest pieces of feedback I've had is around displaying the actual git commands that lazygit runs so now there's a new panel that does exactly that, displayed by default. I find that works well for demystifying what's going on and can actually help educate on which commands can satisfy which use cases. It's also kept me accountable in that if I try to satisfy some use case in a sneaky, smart way, it results in a scary looking series of git commands, so I've scaled back some of the 'magical' stuff that was going on for the sake of user confidence.

I always read these "make git easy" threads and I've also written my own "make git easy" wrapper around git. But this comment is the first that has ever given me confidence in actually trying one (by someone else). Nice job.

What a great idea! Improved confidence + faster learning in a single feature.

>Literally every git GUI I've used has screwed up a git repository at some point,

I got burnt by this with svn... when unfucking things was a lot more complicated and required faster disk and connection.

I found this to be true for a long time, but these days you have something like Fork which is much lore user friendly and FAST! We used to use Sourcetree, which is an abomination in comparison.

I always use(d) the terminal, but Fork is the first time I am considering using a GUI as my main tool.

Granted I haven't had to do anything complicated yet with it, so I don't know if it supports it, but I love it for the basic day-to-day tasks that I do 100's of times a week.

Also, GitUp (don't know the state of development now, though). Blazingly fast (but not on big repos with years and years of history), almost everything is done via keyboard shortcuts, allows scenarios like "oh, just mov this commit down, this comit up, squash these two, and re-write the commit message" in 5 seconds tops

Fork is fantastic, plus it’s nice to have a piece of quality software that doesn’t require a subscription. That said, if they released a new major version I would likely pay for it because I’ve been very happy.

Fork is amazing, paid user here. We used to be on SourceTree but found out the hard way that it's a massive CPU hog, especially after being open for a long time (at least on Mac OS).

I'll have to give it a try - I'm not opposed to GUIs, I've just had consistently bad experiences :)

And agreed on Sourcetree. It started out promising, but oof. Not any more.

I was also in this boat, but vscode has been reliable for me. Maybe I’m not clicking the wrong options, but I used the gut cli exclusively for years so maybe my mental model is in the right place to avoid that.

I use Fork for picking apart which lines I want to commit. It's very cumbersome to commit only specific files and lines using the terminal.

I use the terminal for everything else. I would never trust a GUI to do a rebase, not even sure if it's possible with Fork because I've never tried.

It definitely is, and the UX is quite lovely :)

I use GitSavvy. It feels the safest to me because I use the same small set of actions frequently. I fuck things up on the command line much more readily and in ways that I find harder to fix.

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