alt Hacker NewsI use magit daily for over 8 years now. Over that time I have showed it to many other peers, out of excitement for a tool that made me more productive and helped me learn - but I never could convince even one to use it. Maybe it's my persuasion skills, maybe tool usage is too personal - I don't know, but it makes me kind of sad. The UX of magit is just out of this world.
Especially for rebasing, subset rebases (using --onto, see https://git-scm.com/book/en/v2/Git-Branching-Rebasing#_more_...) are a breeze with Magit. I can't remember the order of branches to use on the CLI, in Magit it's just "r s" basically. It's really magic.
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I personally don’t care for rebasing in magit (I actually find it confusing when hitting conflicts).
My primary reason for using it is reviewing and staging commits. The non-linear staging with line granularity (which also lets you revert changes at the same time) is so, so very good when you care about crafting commits.
I used to use Magit, but once I discovered LazyGit four years ago, I never looked back. No Emacs bloat and a great TUI-based UX with quick single key press actions.
My exact experience, though I did learn it from a co-worker, so at least he did succeed. :)
It looks really cool but the thing is, having learned git just as a cli tool, I don't think any UI would convert me from that workflow.
The exception is maybe diffing, where I just use meld as the difftool.
> I never could convince even one to use it
Most people think it's "just another interface on top of git" — without several in-depth examples it's difficult to realize that it actually allows you to complete really complex tasks quickly. I've seen this superficial take many times.
Same experience here. Showed it to coworkers, but none was interested in making their tooling work well. Even looking for a VSCode equivalent for them (edamagit) no one was even willing to try. Yet people complained about many branches in repos, which didn't impact me at all, but for their GUI git clients apparently were a problem, and so we switched to deleting branches upon merge, discarding some git history along with that (when something was merged).
What makes something easier in magit than, for example, SmartGit?
I'll never touch any git wrapper, because they've lied to me before and I can use git already. Everything that was there to be sped up has already been made into zsh functions.
Same, emacs being the barrier for most.
Magit is absolutely the best Git GUI ever.
Unfortunately, for most people the fact that it's part of Emacs is a blocker.
And because most people use worse Git tools, they tend to use workflows that are easier with more cumbersome tools; generally just committing all kinds of junk commits to a branch, and using the "squash and merge" feature of GitHub or GitLab to clean everything in a PR/MR up into a single commit.
So yeah, it's sad that people don't use Git to its full potential because almost no other Git interface works as well, and most people aren't going to learn Emacs just for a Git UI.