MacPorts vs GitKraken Client

MacPorts eschews Apple-supplied libraries and links sources against its own making sure that the experience is the same regardless of what OS X version is used.

Detailed instructions on the homepage are easy to follow. Official GUI app is also available

MacPorts generally gets new software soon after it's available. This way users will not have to worry if their software is up to date.

MacPorts has a variants system that allows customizing builds with author provided options.

As of this writing, 20K packages. 3 to 5x more than other current package managers.

No need to worry if some rogue app will change your binaries or configuration.

Considering just how often Apple breaks things, any reduplication of of Apple-supplied libraries with the canonical sources is an asset.

Written in Tcl & C, it's generally significantly faster than the competition. Tcl is also quite readable and comparable to Ruby, so it's also friendly to newcomers.

Homebrew dropped support for old Macs. MacPorts still supports them.

No need to install Ruby, or any other programming language.

With Apple moving over to its own silicon, macports has been ready for the move to ARM since 2.6.4

Reading the story behind MacPorts, it is the only one that was developed by Apple by an Apple employee. In fact it is the same person that was responsible for creating the FreeBSD port system.

For example, trying to install Finch using Pkgsrc doesn't work, while installing it using MacPorts works perfectly. Finch isn't even on Homebrew's radar.

It's modern and beautiful, it looks clean and refined.

It's simple: the most used features (pull, push, branch, stash, commit) are accessible in one click, and are the only buttons. The other features aren't in complicated menus nor in hundreds of buttons, but rather displayed when you right-click on something.

It gives more space to the commits, i.e. the most important things. In fact, you can collapse or reduce the other menus/windows.

It displays the current path (project, branch) on an horizontal (clickable) bar at the top. It's just a matter of taste but I prefer this to the traditional "tree" view.

It has undo and redo buttons on the main window.

It supports some drag-and-drop gestures (for example: drag-and-droping the local branch to the remote one pushes it).

A lot of care has gone into trying to make GitKraken as easy and intuitive as possible and it show. Every action is quick and painless with no more user interaction than necessary. For example, switching to another branch is as easy as a double-click on the sidebar.

Built on top of Electron, so it runs on Linux, Mac, and Windows.

GitKraken has simple undo/redo buttons that work the same way you'd expect in any other software.

GitKraken can be connected to Github, Gitlab, or Bitbucket accounts through OAuth. From that point onward most if not all actions that are related to these services can be done inside GitKraken. Things like: cloning or forking a repository, adding a remote, pushing to a remote repository hosted on these services can be done inside the app.

You can even manage pull requests inside GitKraken for example. All pull requests for a certain branch for example are shown on that branch's graph.

There are both pro and free versions available. The free version is pretty complete feature-wise for day-to-day operations.

A quick glance at GitKraken's release notes shows how frequently it's updated. Updates are released on a 2-4 week cycle and each one brings new features and bug fixes.

Supports GitFlow out of the box.

GitKraken has a fuzzy finder to switch between repos/files.

GitKraken is easy to use and is brilliant for the beginner developers.

No more eyestrain staring at white screens - GitKraken has a lovely dark theme.