When comparing Fork vs Magit, the Slant community recommends Fork for most people. In the question“What are the best Git clients for Windows?” Fork is ranked 2nd while Magit is ranked 6th.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Fast and easy to use
Pro Comfortable when staging line-by-line changes
This feature is superior to the one that is implemented by SourceTree as it does not reset the file scroll view to the top of the file after each stage.
If you do feature-specific commits after some time of development - it's very important to be able to easily compose the commit from different line-based changes.
Pro Smart Diff is very handy
Pro Tabbed interface
Several repos can be open at once in individual tabs, so it's trivial to switch back and forth between them.
Pro Overall aesthetic
The GUI components are flawless on the Mac. It is expected to be a similar experience on Windows. Once you realize that you can filter by branch, your appreciation for the product will go up dramatically.
Pro Dark theme support
Pro Highlights the difference within a line
Pro Merge Conflict Resolution is great
Pro Comfortable keyboard shortcuts
Pro Repositories with uncommitted changes have a * next to their name
This is an update from previous versions.
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
Cons
Con Still a young client, thus not as feature rich
This git GUI client is quite young compared to industry old-timers like git-tower 2 or SourceTree. So it's not as feature rich as you'd like. Still a very capable client for a simple day-to-day work.
Con No Linux version
This git client is not compatible with Linux making the life harder for the developers that work on both, MacOS and some Linux distro.
Con Requires granting access to your git projects for the developer of the app
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.