SmartGit is very handy at viewing diffs, logs, history and deleting/staging working copy files
SpecsUpdate
Question Ranking
Pros
Pro Uncluttered UI
SmartGit has a rather clean and uncluttered user interface. All the most useful tools and information are displayed at all times or are otherwise just a couple of clicks away.
All repositories are displayed in the sidebar and through a tabbed interface you can view various info about a specific repository (files, branches, branch graph, etc). The most used git commands like pull, push, sync, commit and merge are always available on top.
Pro Easy to use
The clean and intuitive UI makes SmartGit very easy even for people with no prior experience with Git, even after reading just a bit on how Git works and what the main commands are.
Pro Smart embedded difference viewer
When the changes affect only a few characters in a line of code, the embedded difference viewers in the majority of competitors (such as SourceTree) show the whole line as removed and re-added. SmartGit highlights the characters that have been removed / added, so they are easier to read.
Pro Free for non-commercial use
SmartGit can be used free of charge by Open Source developers, teachers and their students, or for hobby, non-paid usage.
Pro Supports Git, Mercurial, and SVN
SmartGit/Hg supports Git and Mercurial, as well as SVN via git bridge.
Pro Git-flow support
Git-flow provides a consistent development process by defining a strict branching model that is great for managing large projects. SmartGit/Hg allows for setting up and integrating into repos that follow this model.
Pro Great view of the timeline of the project (the log)
Pro Portable version for Windows is available
SmartGit also has a portable bundle that can be downloaded and can be run from external devices (such as a flash drive for example).
Pro GPG support
GPG in SmartGit makes for added security.
Pro Auto-detects repositories on disk
Pro Best submodule workflow on the market
You can easily update submodules from the containing repo, unlike other GUIs that require you to open each repo separately. Saves a lot of time when working on a monorepo managed using submodules.
Pro Can be integrated with Github, Bitbucket, and Atlassian Stash
Using OAuth, you can connect SmartGit with your accounts in Github, Bitbucket, or Stash and access the remote repositories there. You can then clone, fork, commit or push to your remote repositories from inside SmartGit. You can also view and manage pull requests for your open source projects from SmartGit.
Cons
Con Irritating starting screen
The start screen gets on top of all and every window that's open until SmartGit itself opens up (which takes some time).
Con Proprietary license
Not an open source license.
Con Auto clean-up consumes a lot of resources
Leaving SmartGit idle for some time will launch project clean-up, which uses a lot of PC processing power, making it completely unusable until it finishes. This can be disabled from the options menu, but should have been disabled by default.
Con Some git functionality has been renamed
In order to preserve the same interface across Git and Mercurial, some naming compromises have been made so that the various VCS it supports are all consistent with each other.