When comparing Magit vs Gitg, the Slant community recommends Magit for most people. In the question“What are the best graphical git clients for Linux?” Magit is ranked 2nd while Gitg is ranked 3rd. 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 Client side decoration (CSD)
Pro Beautiful and simple
The UI is very straightforward, once you open it, you can browse your computer to find an existing git repository and open it in the app. Once opened you can browse commits and view remotes immediately. It also allows you to browse the files and preview them.
There's also a commit view which shows past commit messages, as well as unstaged and untracked commits.
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 Some git features are missing
There are some key/authentication issues.