When comparing GitHub Desktop vs GitX-dev, the Slant community recommends GitX-dev for most people. In the question“What are the best Git clients for macOS?” GitX-dev is ranked 4th while GitHub Desktop is ranked 12th. The most important reason people chose GitX-dev is:
Allows for interactive staging of files or hunks and deleting of unstaged or non-git tracked files. Hunk size slider allows staging/unstaging individual lines, letting you stage pieces of a file easily.
Specs
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Pros
Pro Great GitHub integration
This is the official GitHub desktop client built by the GitHub team.
Pro Simple, streamlined GUI
GitHub Desktop uses an extremely simplistic two-panel view. It's not capable of complex historical visualisations like other GUIs, but it is very easy to use (especially for git novices).
Pro Supports pull requests
In addition to being able to seamlessly and easily integrate with all of GitHub's features, it also supports forking and submitting pull requests on any open source project hosted on GitHub.
Pro Visual commit mode
Allows for interactive staging of files or hunks and deleting of unstaged or non-git tracked files. Hunk size slider allows staging/unstaging individual lines, letting you stage pieces of a file easily.
Pro Fast GUI
Responsive even with thousands of files or large binary like files
Pro Understandable trees (branches etc.)
The visualisation of the development trees makes git a lot more useful. The command line is good for a lot, but trees are for GUI clients like GitX.
Cons
Con Limited
Can't handle complex tasks. The Help Manual advises to use command-line Git instead.
Con Does not support multiple Remotes for a repo
Only allowed to assign one URL as remote. To manage/sync/fetch other remotes, use command-line Git instead.
Con Overly Simplified UI
UI that is designed not to support the needs of power and enterprise users. Management of more than five repos is next to impossible.
Con Buggy
Poster child for authors' programming ideology (FRP), likely the cause for the odd quirks and bugs it has.
Con Not free/libre
This application is proprietary, and thus cannot be modified or freely distributed.
Con No Linux support
There's no Linux version of this client.
Con Non-GitHub repositories are not fully supported
Since this is mainly a GitHub client, other repositories are not fully supported and with as many features and setting up a repo hosted anywhere else but GitHub is troublesome.
Con Clumsy staging workflow
The staging workflow in GitX-dev is kind of clumsy and unintuitive in the opinion of some. (others love it)