[bsdubernerd]

For the sake of discussion, can we get some contrarian views?

I'm using magit, along with tig, plain git and sometimes (!) even plain "vc", depending on context. I'm in the camp that thinks it's ok and it's pretty comfortable to use within emacs, but I don't see the earth shattering praise I see every time it's mentioned here.

Tig for example is so much faster for history and blame perusal that I find it faster to keep it open in another terminal and just switch to it.

Altenatives? Contrarians?

[brabel]

Ok, let me try.

I prefer IntelliJ's git interface.

Magit can do everything IJ can, but in IJ, I can find how to do things more easily and it just feels easier to do things, probably because it's much more GUI than text compared to Magit. For example, difficult merges are extremely easy in IntelliJ, I can edit code in the diff view itself while I resolve conflicts... in Magit it requires getting used to the different diff views, something I am still trying to figure out, but it seems trickier to do "in-place" changes in the code.

That said: I probably only prefer IJ because I've been using it much longer than I have used Magit... and the difference for me is very small, so I suspect the more I use Magit, the more the gap will close and I may eventually like it even more than IJ.

[hbn]

IntelliJ's git interface is basically the only way I can use git, or at the very least pull off anything other than the most standard tasks.

Its UI for resolving merge conflicts is so intuitive and powerful. You get 3 panels: local changes on the left, remote changes on the right, and merged in the middle. It's got colored highlighting going across from each of the side to the middle, showing where the changes want to go to, and you click arrows to accept/dismiss left or right, and sometimes it'll even have a suggestion for a way to take both of the changes (indicated by a magic wand). And you can also just type into the center editor if you want to not use either side, and manually rewrite the resolved change yourself, whether that be copy-pasting from each side or whatever you want to do.

It's saved me so many times, it's practically worth the cost of the entire IDE on its own.

[seastonATccs]

IntelliJ GIT ui/ux is so completely frictionless it's magical at times. The only downside is that it makes incredibly complex operations trivial that I never learned git from the cli beyond the very basics.

[forgotmypw17]

IntelliJ is amazing, and I'd love to have a standalone version of its git frontend for my slower machines.

[gpderetta]

Being able to edit the diff directly in the status buffer would be a great additional feature in magit!

[rich_sasha]

I use emacs and git, and never got on with magit. Not entirely sure why, but here's a braindump:

- I generally dislike layers on layers; while I seriously hate the git UI, I'd rather learn that, as it's a more portable skill, than learn another UI, that relies on emacs and a package installed. First thing I do on e.g. a new cloud instance is clone a bunch of stuff, and often work on an under-setup machine for a while. For similar reasons, I don't use shells like Fish, which, nice as they may be, funnel me into something totally incompatible with good old sh. Bash and zsh, as far as I use them, are compatible.

- I work in tmux, and emacs in terminal, the overhead of switching to a terminal and typing some git stuff is tiny.

- I tried magit and just didn't get it. I couldn't couldn't find a happy path where I thought, "ah yes this is niice".

[jolmg]

> - I tried magit and just didn't get it. I couldn't couldn't find a happy path where I thought, "ah yes this is niice".

I mostly use plain git instead of Magit, for more or less the same reason, although I like git's UI.

I did find a happy path, though. Magit's blame interface is very nice to recursively call git-blame and navigate history of pieces of code. I ended up making a CLI program to improve git blame[1] so that I didn't end up switching to Magit just for that, but doing git-blame from Magit is still better.

[1] https://github.com/jolmg/git-reblame

[laserlight]

> I generally dislike layers on layers; while I seriously hate the git UI, I'd rather learn that

I'm surprised to hear this. Magit is a very thin layer on top of git. Not thin in the technical sense, but in UI/UX sense. Keybindings map almost one to one with git CLI. Arguments to the git CLI are explicitly stated. Executed git command is reported. I learned git better by using Magit.

[TeMPOraL]

> I'd rather learn that, as it's a more portable skill, than learn another UI, that relies on emacs and a package installed

FWIW, most Magit commands have 1:1 correspondence with git commands; when I'm worried I'm doing something with Magit that I wouldn't be able to replicate with CLI, I just press '$' to pop up the "process buffer", i.e. the buffer containing actual git commands being executed, along with their output. Conversely, I still read git documentation to figure out more advanced Magit workflows.

My way of looking at it is, Magit is just an ergonomics layer on top of git - it doesn't introduce new abstractions, it just lets you do stuff in a more efficient and interactive way. The love comes from that efficiency - the improvement is big enough to make a qualitative difference and affect the way I interact with git.

(And, of course, you can just press !! and type in whatever git CLI command you want, to run in context of your repository.)

> the overhead of switching to a terminal and typing some git stuff is tiny.

Switching cost is low, but typing cost is much greater.

Of course, everyone has their own preferences. I personally swear by Magit, and I'd love to have more command line tools be integrated with equivalent interface. Magit's UX paradigm isn't a total replacement for all CLI - but it's perfect for tools you repetitively invoke with different parameters to sculpt something.

[yodsanklai]

I'm not a terminal maximalist, but most git actions are easy to perform from the terminal. Switching to a terminal and typing the right git command has little overhead, and it's a universal way of doing things.

[eddieh]

My contrarian view: I pronounce it maggot. I think Mag-it sounds weird.

That said, I’ve financially backed Magits development (Kickstarter iirc) and I use it almost everyday, but I don’t do merges with it. I’ve had some large merges go really slow thru Magit. So I always do my merges in the terminal using the plain git CLI.

[grumpyprole]

Magit is unfortunately so slow on Windows that it's unusable. This is a real shame, because the UI is fantastic. I think a better architecture would use libgit2 calls rather than launching multiple git processes for every single magit operation.

[bsdubernerd]

Magit is not particularly fast on *nix either. Most of the UI operates on buffers which are prepared infrequently, so the latency doesn't have significant impact. This is a very good UI design for magit itself, since staying within emacs provides bigger benefits in most cases.

However, my own cited example about browsing history and blames is one case where I cannot just stomach the subpar efficiency. Tig also runs git as a subprocess, but every view is truly incremental and you can scroll through any buffer in any view and there's absolutely zero delay. Night and day even when comparing emacs with JIT.

Like for magit, tig has one keystroke shortcuts that make sense (which IMHO is pretty common on good TUI programs) and can perform many git operations directly from the spot you're looking at.

I also consider the visual space usage in tig to be much more efficient as well. Especially the blame view, which I find still wasteful in all modes compared to tig's. I frequently use a customized vc-annotate instead.

Magit hooks also considerably slow down operations on remote files, which can be quite annoying if you don't actively need to use git while editing.

Don't get me wrong - I like magit. But like org-mode, I don't get the glorification it gets.

[jolmg]

Is the launching of processes on Windows so much slower than on Unix-type OSes that it would cause it to be "so slow" for that reason?

Maybe the reason is another? Personally, I once had Magit act real slow at times because git-annex had added some git hook for something that I didn't need. Just removing that hook improved performance massively. Perhaps something similar is happening.

Also, I'm not sure Emacs Lisp can interface directly with C libraries, so using libgit2 might not be an option.

[AJRF]

I get the same impression using org mode vs hearing people talk about it. It's great! but the way it's talked about makes you think it will change your life and finally stop you being a lazy procrastinating fool.

It's very cool and flexible and doesn't tie you in to any big tech provider (yay!), but it's just an outliner at the end of the day.

[TheFreim]

I like org mode, I use it every single day, and I'd agree most of the time. 9/10 I'm using it as a glorified markdown editor, but on that 1/10 occasion where I get to do something really cool is where it feels magical.

[incanus77]

I really like https://gitup.co.

[bentcorner]

I picked up Sublime Text + Merge a few months ago (I wanted Sublime Text and figured I'd try out Merge since the bundle was cheaper), and it turns out I use Sublime Merge way more. (Sublime Text is fine but for my workflow it has a bunch of gaps with Visual Studio that I haven't been able to fill).

Sublime Merge and vscode + git plugins are pretty close to each other but Sublime Merge does everything I need with less fuss. vscode just has some rough edges due to it's swiss-army knife approach that Sublime Merge doesn't.

[caskstrength]

I'm not familiar with tig. Is it convenient for staging chunks of code or even individual lines? Interactive rebase including re-splitting commits? Cherry-picking stuff?

While working on kernel I sometimes get "looks nice, but can you reorder and re-split this 15-patches series in completely different way?" and magit is a big time-saver for that. It wasn't as useful on my previous jobs where 1k-lines commits with message like "Implement feature X" were the norm, though.

[VMG]

chunk/line staging: yes

interactive rebase: no

cherry-picking: yes

[jidiculous]

I can't imagine (haven't tried it so I'm just speculating here) that Magit functions very comfortably on something like a deep clone of the Linux repo, but I think there would be very few monolithic projects most of us would encounter with that kind of lengthy history in our day-to-day work. Maybe some Googlers could weigh in on how their large repos are handled by Magit?

[ChrisMarshallNY]

I'm not going to post anything "contrarian," so to speak, because this really does seem to be an excellent tool.

I will say that I won't be using it, as I use GUI tools, with a far smaller "power" level, and use command-line Git for the few times I need anything fancy.

[jimbobimbo]

I'm using Visual Studio Code for basic git functionality and switch to Visual Studio proper when I have to deal with gnarly merges. Merge UX is fantastic in VS.