Comment by thijsvandien

I'm not sure about that in the case of git. I used the terminal UI exclusively for a long time but it's so bizarrely designed that I've been interested in using a GUI for a while. There are a lot of reasons a dev should learn to use a terminal but making git more pleasant to use isn't necessarily one of them.

GUIs aren't super flexible but they are good at taking a common flow users go through and making it stupid simple to exercise. A lot of the usage of git should be stupid simple, with only infrequent need for complex interaction. Obviously there are some people out there for which a GUI will never be sufficient for their needs, but I'd argue it isn't the common case.

I'm typically a heavy terminal user. Git is my exception. a) the UI of git cli is just so terrible that I'd rather fill my brain with more important things, and b) for viewing what's changed, `git diff` just doesn't cut it relative to a GUI.

Sourcetree is my go to git client, but if I couldn't use sourcetree I'd be OK with pretty much any git GUI. But git CLI is reserved for particularly tricky things that GUIs just can't handle well. (And I need to look up the specific flags or commands every single time.)

Just yesterday I noticed a "Fork Activation" option in the Fork menu with fields for an email and a license key. I think you might be right, it won't be free for much longer.

It's a 3 way merge tool that works well with Fork. To be honest I can't say how it compares with other merge tools, I tried a few merge tools some time back and liked P4 best.

I suggest using SourceGear DiffMerge for resolving conflicts. Best 3-way merge conflict handling tool I've tried:

https://sourcegear.com/diffmerge/

Tower became unusably slow for me. I switched to GitKraken and have been very pleased.

> the model is simple and intuitive

I nearly spat out my drink. Git is many things but those aren't the first two words that would leap into my head.

Say you want to find a commit that occurred around June three years ago, and look at what the repo looked like after that commit -- without checking out any files. How do you currently do it?

For me, I just Right click -> TortoiseGit -> Show Log -> scroll -> Right-click -> Browse Repository.

How long does it take you? For me it takes < 10 seconds (I just timed myself).

Try doing a merge with IntelliJ's 3-way merge UI. It's flippin' fantastic compared to roaming through the files and removing sections between >>>> and <<<<.

Many people are visual. It's a lot easier to see changes, compare diffs, and generally follow the development branches through a GUI instead of through a command line.

I think the main advantage of GUIs in general is a contextual, curated explorability that is often lacking in CLI tools. The GUI is stateful, allows the user to click on things and prod it, and hopefully shows the most frequently used features for that context. This allows even complete newbies to be productive almost immediately.

For something like git, the slightly more visual representation is a benefit to many, too.

I'm not here to knock CLIs, there are a set of tradeoffs to be made, and CLIs win in many cases (flexibility, scriptability, being able to copy snippets you frequently use, etc). The above does tend to hold true, however.

Git is famous for being unintuitive?

One of the advantages is you can easily explore what changes were made and merge conflicts through the tool.

I like to drag and drop commits into an order I want when doing an interactive rebase.

I wonder the opposite thing: why do people try to use git in a terminal?

Its output is so rich and complex that it's impossible to make it legible outside of a real GUI, with graphics and colors.

for a new person, it's almost impossible to get anything done with git command line

I think most folks like a graphical merge tool, such as opendiff, or at least that's what I've been able to glean.

I work on a lot of repositories, having a GUI makes it really easy to change context and getting up-to-speed quickly.

As someone else mentioned here, the graphical merge tool in IDEA is extremely powerful. Plus keyboard shortcuts to all the main Git actions. It's overall more efficient. However I always use Git IDEA + Git CLI side by side.

Same boat here. I’ll concede that they do add things, but as a pretty small scale hobbyist they don’t add anything I want or need. But they expect me to pay the same full price as a pro user.

I used to buy it every couple of versions or when it went on sale, and that was good enough for my needs. No such luck anymore.

And I think all the plans come with cloud storage which syncs across devices.

I fought the subscription plan for LR, but realized I usually updated yearly and had this complicated file management system for my photos. For $120/year I have the latest LR versions on all my devices and only have to worry about true backup.

I do keep an eye out for a LR replacement, but I haven't found anything that comes close to LRs file management.

Switched to GnuCash and didn't look back. The UI is uglier, but at least it works correctly with double entry bookkeeping.

There’s Sage 50 if you want desktop, but even desktop QB is on life support and everyone’s going online.

> They need some real competition.

Have you tried Xero? I haven’t, but if you have, I’d be curious to hear your take on it.