If you know what you're doing, CLI is just faster. I understand that it's aimed at more novice developers, but I think for those developers it's even more important to use the command line. Developers that get into the habit of using unnecessary graphical UIs always seem worse off because of it.
This is quite true with other Git GUIs since they pretty much wrap the Git CLI and add a bunch of dialogs and whatnot, but GitUp was designed especially to avoid that. I'm a big user of the CLI myself, so the last thing I wanted was to build a Git client with a slower interaction model :)
Between the keyboard shortcuts and the fact it deals directly with the repo database, GitUp is actually faster than the CLI in a number of cases. Experienced Git users do notice it on Twitter and on the GitUp forums. One example from my workflow: just rebasing my work branch is instantaneous in GitUp while the Git CLT takes a couple seconds (the UX being as fast in both cases to perform the operation, so a net gain for sure).
YMMV of course and you can totally use GitUp for some operations and Git CLI for some others.
Does this mean we have to rely on your code to be fully compatible with the repo database? I mean git is obviously tested and true when it comes to modifying the database, so I trust it.
Now I don't know anything about the formats used, so maybe it's not a big issue. But for such a critical piece it's quite important.
gr = !git \
--no-pager \
log -n 16 --graph --date-order --date=short --branches \
--pretty=\
'%C(yellow bold)%h%Creset\
%Creset %C(blue bold)%d%Creset\
%C(white bold blink)%s'