The only downside I've found to magit is that the UI refresh can be slow with very large commits: when you're adding a thousand generated files, doing a big fin

The only downside I've found to magit is that the UI refresh can be slow with very large commits: when you're adding a thousand generated files, doing a big find/replace, etc. In the shell you'd just be running `git status` or `git diff src/foo/` or some such targeted command and would get near-instant results. The flip side is that I've never seen magit end up in an inconsistent state, which is probably for the same reason it's slow: it's not doing anything "clever," just directly showing you the information it got from git.