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For me, Magit's killer feature is that it provides something equivalent to "git add --interactive" but with a much nicer UI. If you're interactively adding thin

For me, Magit's killer feature is that it provides something equivalent to "git add --interactive" but with a much nicer UI. If you're interactively adding things to a commit then you are effectively editing a text file, and that's always going to be easier in a proper text editor than on the command line. Magit can show you all of the hunks that can be staged simultaneously, allowing you to choose, split, edit, and delete them with a full contextual overview, rather than sequentially. If make multiple edits to different files before committing, this can be very useful to ensure that the commit makes sense, doesn't include logically unrelated changes, and so on. Or, if you follow a "commit early, commit often" approach, Magit's interface is also nice for restructuring those commits during a rebase/squash. Perhaps it helps to think of commits as documents in their own right, as commits are effectively patch files, at which point it makes sense to use an editor to, well, edit them.

tomxor 5y ago
I think your argument pretty much boils down to the same as for most GUI vs CLI arguments: parallel vs serial, intuitive vs abstract etc... but it all comes at a cost, less flexibility, less power, more complexity, less combinability (less unixy). Just saying, the argument is the same as for any other GUI version of a particular CLI tool, and so it's inevitable we end up with an opinionated divide, because it's not objectively better in all ways - it depends on your values. For me the most valued aspect is return on my investment for learning a tool... official git cli porcelain will be around for a _long_ time, it's available almost everywhere, it gives the most power and flexibility, I can combine it with all kinds of things for new problems - Magit (or otherwise) exists in a much narrower context, I know it's probably only a subset of git porcelain to smooth over the staging and committing etc, but I prefer to stay familiar with git cli... Perhaps more critically, I've already mastered 95% of the official git cli porcelain and then some, so I suppose from my perspective my return on investment for using yet another git porcelain feels fairly low, even for the specific case of staging, i've done it so much it's second nature, and I'm generally comfortable with the serial nature of globing files over the CLI.
- gpderetta 5y ago
  emacs predates git by decades and probably will outlast it. While magit is not emacs it is reasonable to expect that it will be maintained by someone for a long time.
- omnicognate 5y ago
  You're assuming magit is less flexible than the command line porcelain, but it's not materially so afaik. It's pretty complete and claims to be the only actual "porcelain" besides the cli. I've certainly never encountered an operation I couldn't perform in magit. Edit: the relevant claim from the docs is > Magit is an interface to the version control system Git, implemented as an Emacs package. Magit aspires to be a complete Git porcelain. While we cannot (yet) claim that Magit wraps and improves upon each and every Git command, it is complete enough to allow even experienced Git users to perform almost all of their daily version control tasks directly from within Emacs. While many fine Git clients exist, only Magit and Git itself deserve to be called porcelains.
- NateEag 5y ago
  I felt exactly like you do for years before I finally learned Magit - as a competent CLI user, most of the Git GUIs I'd poked at were frustratingly limited and seemed worse than pointless for someone who had gotten a handle on the Git CLI. Once I took a little while to learn Magit, it significantly reduced the number of keystrokes I needed for normal git operations. It also made rebasing less of a chore in several ways. It's still a bit of a tossup whether I'll use the terminal UI or Magit for a given operation, depending if I'm already in the terminal, but unlike most GUIs, I've found Magit actually reduced my friction for day-to-day work relative to the Git CLI.

tomxor 5y ago

I think your argument pretty much boils down to the same as for most GUI vs CLI arguments: parallel vs serial, intuitive vs abstract etc... but it all comes at a cost, less flexibility, less power, more complexity, less combinability (less unixy). Just saying, the argument is the same as for any other GUI version of a particular CLI tool, and so it's inevitable we end up with an opinionated divide, because it's not objectively better in all ways - it depends on your values. For me the most valued aspect is return on my investment for learning a tool... official git cli porcelain will be around for a _long_ time, it's available almost everywhere, it gives the most power and flexibility, I can combine it with all kinds of things for new problems - Magit (or otherwise) exists in a much narrower context, I know it's probably only a subset of git porcelain to smooth over the staging and committing etc, but I prefer to stay familiar with git cli... Perhaps more critically, I've already mastered 95% of the official git cli porcelain and then some, so I suppose from my perspective my return on investment for using yet another git porcelain feels fairly low, even for the specific case of staging, i've done it so much it's second nature, and I'm generally comfortable with the serial nature of globing files over the CLI.

gpderetta 5y ago
emacs predates git by decades and probably will outlast it. While magit is not emacs it is reasonable to expect that it will be maintained by someone for a long time.
omnicognate 5y ago
You're assuming magit is less flexible than the command line porcelain, but it's not materially so afaik. It's pretty complete and claims to be the only actual "porcelain" besides the cli. I've certainly never encountered an operation I couldn't perform in magit. Edit: the relevant claim from the docs is > Magit is an interface to the version control system Git, implemented as an Emacs package. Magit aspires to be a complete Git porcelain. While we cannot (yet) claim that Magit wraps and improves upon each and every Git command, it is complete enough to allow even experienced Git users to perform almost all of their daily version control tasks directly from within Emacs. While many fine Git clients exist, only Magit and Git itself deserve to be called porcelains.
NateEag 5y ago
I felt exactly like you do for years before I finally learned Magit - as a competent CLI user, most of the Git GUIs I'd poked at were frustratingly limited and seemed worse than pointless for someone who had gotten a handle on the Git CLI. Once I took a little while to learn Magit, it significantly reduced the number of keystrokes I needed for normal git operations. It also made rebasing less of a chore in several ways. It's still a bit of a tossup whether I'll use the terminal UI or Magit for a given operation, depending if I'm already in the terminal, but unlike most GUIs, I've found Magit actually reduced my friction for day-to-day work relative to the Git CLI.