Magit vs SmartGit

Simple tasks, such as commits, can quickly be made without leaving the editor.

You can easily learn the mnemonics for the most common tasks and use them to your advantage to speed up your workflow.

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.

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.

brew install magit

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 can be used free of charge by Open Source developers, teachers and their students, or for hobby, non-paid usage.

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 supports Git and Mercurial, as well as SVN via git bridge.

Git-flow 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.

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.

SmartGit also has a portable bundle that can be downloaded and can be run from external devices (such as a flash drive for example).

GPG in SmartGit makes for added security.

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.

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.

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.

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

This allows great layouts as desired.

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.

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

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

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

All that you know in Git, you see in SmartGit. Even the commands, that GUI uses for itself.

Use gitk, git gui, SourceTree, GitKraken.

So you just can select the issue instead of having to copy-paste the issue number and subject from a browser having JIRA open.