When comparing Magit vs git-cola, the Slant community recommends Magit for most people. In the question“What are the best Git clients for Windows?” Magit is ranked 6th while git-cola is ranked 20th. The most important reason people chose Magit is:
Simple tasks, such as commits, can quickly be made without leaving the editor.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Uninterrupted workflow for common tasks
Simple tasks, such as commits, can quickly be made without leaving the editor.
Pro Diffs are easy
Since it's integrated with Emacs, diffs are very easy to fix. You can jump right to any file you want to fix as soon as it comes up in the logs or in the status view.
Pro Easy to remember mnemonics
You can easily learn the mnemonics for the most common tasks and use them to your advantage to speed up your workflow.
Pro Better visualization and interactive workflow
Pro Stage hunks or even just parts of a hunk using a single key press
In Magit staging a hunk or even just part of a hunk is very easy.
Magit also implements several other "apply variants" in addition to staging and unstaging. For example: you can also discard or reverse a change, or apply it to the working tree.
Pro Blame information can be viewed inline with the file
Pro Multiple buffers are used to show contextual information
Pro Powerful rebasing
Pro Available in Homebrew
brew install magit
Pro Free software
This application is FOSS, and thus it can be freely modified & distributed.
Pro Cross-platform
Works on Linux, Mac and Windows.
Pro Full unicode support
Pro Minimalist interface
Pro Available in Homebrew
Can be easily installed through homebrew by running brew install git-cola
.
Cons
Con Useful only for people who use Emacs
Magit is only useful if your text editor of choice is Emacs. It wouldn't really make any sense to open up emacs just to run Magit if you use another editor.
Con Limited feature set
You sometimes need to touch the terminal in order to get certain things done.
