Magit vs SmartGit

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

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.

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

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 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.

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.

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'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).

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.

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.

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.

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

Compared to gitk, git gui, SourceTree, GitKraken.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

This allows great layouts as desired.

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.

Not every, but nearly all.

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.

One payment, get updates for all future versions.

And support for own themes.

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

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).

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.

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 kind of squash during Rebase only. Ctrl+J shortcut helps for simple squash commits.

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.

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.

See here.

Across all those years, every mistake I did I was able to recover.