SmartGit Review

SmartGit can be used free of charge by Open Source developers, teachers and their students, or for hobby, non-paid usage. However, some features are only available with paid versions, like JIRA/GitHub Entreprise/Bitbucket integration, distributed review, DeepGit.

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.

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.

SmartGit's log viewer displays the full commit history in a clean UI. This can be filtered to only show commits matching a certain criterion (e.g. branch).

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.

GitFlow provides a consistent development process by defining a strict branching model that is great for managing large projects. SmartGit allows for setting up and integrating into repos that follow this model.

Using OAuth, you can connect SmartGit with your accounts in Github, GitLab, 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.

If normal Git commands would abort because of local modifications, SmartGit can stash them and apply later after the command ran successfully, e.g. a rebase.

Compared to gitk, git gui, SourceTree, GitKraken.

The built-in compare and conflict solver has syntax coloring with customizable colors.

If screen space is limited, one can stack some views onto another. 2 layouts are available - "Main" and "Review" - with independent view positions.

You don't have to search all the repositories when trying out SmartGit the 1st time, but it finds all of them magically.

There is no option of just showing the current branch or all branches, but you can select very fine-grained what branches/forks should be displayed.

External tools (which have a command line support) can be integrated to be used to open/view files, for diff or as conflict solvers. E.g. editors like Notepad++ or VS Code, p4merge to diff images or kdiff3 as diff view/conflict solver.

The file list view can be tweaked and filtered in many ways (e.g. regex can be used).

Apart from Git, SmartGit supports both Mercurial and SVN via a git bridge.

Rebased, but not yet garbage-collected commits can be easily made accessible again, e.g. after a reset hard.

Can make a repo group containing multiple repos; it acts as a meta repo.

Can submit selected files from multiple repos in a repo group in one commit action; uses the same commit message in all the repo commits.

Support responds quickly and they genuinely try to help you! If it's a bug, it will often be fixed within days.

This is very useful when reviewing files before committing and finding a needed quick tweak.

Showing commits from the current branch, its remote branch and one auxiliary branch. Independent of the that, there is a log window available that allows to view all (other) commits.

Not every, but nearly all.

SmartGit also has a portable bundle that can be downloaded and can be run from external devices (such as a flash drive for example) or to test-drive without leaving traces on the machine after removing.

This is extremely useful in histories with a lot of merges. You can focus on the changes on the main branch and expand into a merged branch with a single click when you need to.

Supports GitBugTraq file.

This allows great layouts as desired.

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.

Allows you to select the desired issue, instead of having to do it manually.

GPG in SmartGit makes for added security.

And support for own themes.

One payment, get updates for all future versions.

See here.

It may look confusing at first, but once you know each part, you love how useful they are.

Git squash is a pain on CLI, and most Git clients allow some king of squash during Rebase only. I really like the Ctrl+J shortcup to simply squash commits.