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> novice users are terrified of it. When they make a mistake, many would rather delete and re-clone the repository than try to fix it

In my experience most beginners use a GUI like Atlassian Sourcetree or the Github desktop client. It's a lot harder to make mistakes using the GUI in my experience.

I still really like this idea though; eventually a subset of the beginners wants to learn the git cli and that sure seems scary at first.



GUI tools are a great step forward in my opinion, not because the GUIs are necessary, but because the Git command-line interface is really terrible.

I would like to see a GUI adopt these concepts. There's no reason why we should limit the commit graph display to only the current time, when we have enough information to scroll through its past states as well.


Can I give a shout out to Fork here for being another great GUI for git. I'm not affiliated with them in any way. Just a happy customer.

https://git-fork.com/


Agreed, another happy Fork user here. I switched from Tower as it just got more and more expensive and added features I don't need.


I occasionally screwed it up even with a GUI, possibly because I was trying to recover something and then got lost. Once I had to abandon the master branch for a year because I didn’t know how to fix it.

A year later I had probably learned how to force push correctly and took hold of it again.

However I do think the GUI is great for git and that’s why I use GitHub Desktop. It’s super simple. Most other GUIs try to wrap git concepts too closely for comfort.


For JetBrains users, there is a built-in Git GUI as well.

It's not as easy to use as SourceTree, but since there's no SourceTree for Linux, it works well enough.


I really love the Jetbrains GUI built into their IDEs for this.




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