Git GUIs

In my Let’s Make a Game tutorial, I mentioned that my code could be downloaded with Git from GitHub.  I’m going to use Git for all of my tutorials on Quite Useful, so it’s worth getting familiar with it.

This post briefly reviews a few GUIs for Git, for those of you who don’t like the command line.

GitX

GitX is for Mac OS and is both free and open source.  It’s a native Mac client, so it has a clean interface.  The window defaults to History View; and the main panel shows the commit log, and the bottom panel shows the diff.  The bottom panel can be changed to show a file tree so you can view your entire repository.  The history shows branch merges with graphical visualisation.

There’s a button at the top-left of the window for switching between commit and history views.  Changing the view to Commit View shows lets you stage, commit and push changes.

Switching branches is fast, naturally, and the menu (at the top of the window) shows all branches including remote ones.

GitX is simple but it supports almost everything you should need for day-to-day git usage.  I think it would be a great tool to get people in your team started with git who aren’t comfortable with the command line.

Tortoise-Git

Tortoise-Git is available for Windows, and is both free and open source.  It can use Plink from Putty for ssh connections (most people who use git use SSH rather than the git:// protocol).

It lets you checkout repositories, view commit logs, branch, stash, rebase; pretty much everything!  It integrates with Explorer too, so it’s pretty easy to learn.

Gitk

Gitk actually runs in Windows, Linux and Mac OS.  It’s open source and free.  It’s a little bit more technical than the other clients here, but if you’ve installed git you should have it.  It’s primarily a commit browser, and has some good methods of displaying the graphs for branching.

If you’re using Linux another one to try is git-cola.