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Add to SafariWhen comparing Magit vs gitk, the Slant community recommends Magit for most people. In the question“What are the best Git clients for Windows?” Magit is ranked 6th while gitk is ranked 26th. The most important reason people chose Magit is:
Simple tasks, such as commits, can quickly be made without leaving the editor.
Specs
Question 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 Visibly more compact overview output than many other options
When using gitk to scan a long list of changes, the user is able to see more of the list without pagination, as there is no huge buffer of whitespace between each entry.
Pro Fast
Since it's pretty minimalistic and does not contain a lot of features (for example, it can't commit), it's quite fast.
Pro Free
Gitk is a free and open source tool. It forms part of the official git suite.
Pro Comes with Git
Gitk is a part of the git package, so no additional application is necessary: it is developed right alongside git itself.
Pro Easy to use
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 Cannot commit
The user needs to use a different Git client (GUI or otherwise) to commit changes.
Con Does not automatically update
The user must press F5 to refresh the view as there is no automatic update available.
