When comparing fugitive (via vim) vs GitHub Desktop, the Slant community recommends fugitive (via vim) for most people. In the question“What are the best Git clients for macOS?” fugitive (via vim) is ranked 10th while GitHub Desktop is ranked 12th. The most important reason people chose fugitive (via vim) is:
The visualization and workflow are great in fugitive. You can do side-by-side or even intra-line diffs all without having to leave your text editor.
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Great visualization and interactive workflow
The visualization and workflow are great in fugitive. You can do side-by-side or even intra-line diffs all without having to leave your text editor.
Pro Uninterrupted workflow for common tasks
Simple tasks, such as commits, can quickly be made without leaving the editor.
Pro Seamlessly "Dive into Diffs" to trace the origin & intent of code
git blame
only shows the last change (e.g. a variable rename), but how do you find the origin of the code?
:GBlame
to open blame windowo
on the relevant line to "git show
" the commit- select a diff line from a previous version of the file, and hit
o
to open it- repeat 1 - 3, jumping back through history to find the origin of the line
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.
Cons
Con Poor documentation
The documentation is rather poor and not very helpful.
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.
