I'm one of those folks who will tell people to give the official CLI frontend of git a chance and to try and stick to it. I can assure you it is not out of elitism, but experience. I've tried the many third party GUI frontends, and always got myself into bigger trouble down the line in the end, nor did they bring any of the revelatory boosts in insight they claimed they would. And of course, they're all a little different from one another, so migrating between them is an additional chore.

Then of course it's possible I didn't give the many GUI frontends enough of a chance. Such is life, it's a resource limited game. Principally, I justify my position with the argument that the many GUIs will try to translate git into something visual by adding their own designs, and this can prove additionally misleading and difficult, if git wasn't rough enough already.

The only GUI bits I use for git are editor integrations such as the official one in VS Code, and only when I know it's adequate. Which you can only know if you know what's going on in the background.

GUI is absolutely easier for merge conflicts. I use the one that comes on jetbrain ides which is awesome.

This isn't even opinion. It's fact. Anyone who has experience regularly(keyword) using both CLI and GUI for merge conflicts will side with me on this by an overwhelming majority such that I might as well call this fact.

>This isn't even opinion. It's fact.

I honestly don't mean to insult you but when you say things like this in a discussion where others obviously disagree with you, it makes you seem like either an overly enthusiastic beginner that hasn't learnt about tradeoffs yet, or a very stupid fanatic. You might be neither, but that is how it comes across.

>Anyone who has experience regularly(keyword) using both CLI and GUI for merge conflicts will side with me on this

I and many others simply disagree with you. I have used those tools. They work okay in simple cases but break down in more complex ones. That is my opinion.

But solving merge conflicts is fundamentally an editing task, not source control.

Word processors are for editing documents, saving documents in different locations and formats should be handled by your file system of choice.

Yeah this is true. It’s similar enough such that most gui version control interfaces include an interface to deal with this.

Your editor should be able to handle this (via git mergetool).

The community seems to disagree so far. I'll take a look at how it works tomorrow though. For me most of the misery around merge conflict resolution stems from how git fundamentally works, so I'm not sure how much it can possibly improve on it.

The only people who disagree are people who don't have regular experience from both sides.

Graphical diffs that automatically handle merge conflicts visually with clicks to insert, undo and the ability for custom modification are MUCH MUCH more convenient with a GUI. Highly recommend the jetbrains conflict resolver gui.

I can assure you ANYONE who regularly has experience with both the CLI and that GUI(jetbrains) will hands down say the GUI is superior for merge conflicts. It is NOT intrinsic to the nature of merge conflicts. Any disagreement in this area stems from lack of experience or knowledge.

If anyone has experience with both and they have a contrary opinion, feel free to tell me. I doubt such a person exists though.

I find ediff from Emacs to be superior to the JetBrains conflict resolution view. And I've had to deal with some gnarly (and large) merges at $JOB.

I dunno, something about its keyboard-driven design (and in general being Emacs-based) makes it clearer in usage than the JetBrains offering. Although this is probably what one is used to.

Of course, the really important thing is that people set merge.conflictStyle = zdiff3. Maybe a bit opinionated, but it really makes proper merging a lot easier.

Ediff is still a GUI (yes, even if you're running emacs -nw).

I also thing Ediff has some very annoying behaviors - the fact that it doesn't use intuitive names for the two buffers (especially because of Git's annoying nomenclature when rebasing vs merging), and the fact that there's no shortcut for inserting both the A and the B changes into the destination, which is a common operation.

I haven't really used the JetBrains merge UI, so I don't know if it's better or worse, but I don't think it's very hard to improve over ediff.

> Ediff is still a GUI (yes, even if you're running emacs -nw).

I'd dispute this, and more likely call it a TUI[0], unless of course one wants to go with the really pedantic point that all text is graphical.

It certainly isn't what I would associate with the words GUI merge editor, which feels to me more like what Sublime Merge for example does

> I also thing Ediff has some very annoying behaviors - the fact that it doesn't use intuitive names for the two buffers (especially because of Git's annoying nomenclature when rebasing vs merging), and the fact that there's no shortcut for inserting both the A and the B changes into the destination, which is a common operation.

Yeah, A, B, and C (and when doing the (z)diff3 thing, Ancestor) are certainly not the most intuitive names for the respective buggers (ours, theirs, result, and base in more Git-ish nomenclature) but it gets clear enough with practice. Not really a defence for bad UI, but eh, computer science is certainly known for that.

As for the "keep both" operation, yeah, that's lacking in ediff. There is one in SMerge mode (C-c ^ a) which of course activates when the buffer has any valid conflict markers, but at least in three-way merges, it also keeps the ancestor which is not usually what one wants.

Although at least when I was doing a lot of conflict resolution, a lot of the times it made sense to merge things by hand anyhow (it was a bunch of mega-merges related to a technology upgrade which had been half abandoned due to lack of time/focus from higher-ups), but I agree that the lack of "keep both" is problematic. Should probably file a bug report.

> I haven't really used the JetBrains merge UI, so I don't know if it's better or worse, but I don't think it's very hard to improve over ediff.

Probably not, but it also shouldn't be too difficult to improve on ediff either. And well, I at least like it better than the JetBrains resolution view or whatever VSCode has

[0]: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Text-based_user_interface>

if I understand correctly ediff isn't cli, it is a gui built into emacs, only implemented unsing characters?

I can second this—the JetBrains merge conflicts ui is the best I’ve ever seen.

For some reason there are a lot of subpar uis though. E.g. not showing three versions, only showing THEIRS and not the remote branch name, etc.

I still use it. Even have it set up with Jujutsu. Only complaint is that you have to explicitly exit the app after each use.

It's still free, too.

It works with git??? I had no idea. I highly recommend anyone reading this to try out P4merge as the merge conflict resolver for git. It might be the better alternative to jetbrains as jetbrains usually involves buying into using the entire editor.

Yup, you can get it from https://www.perforce.com/products/helix-core-apps/merge-diff....

I actually use Difftastic on the command-line for diffs and spit out to P4Merge for merges.

Here's my Jujutsu config:

    [ui]
    diff.tool = ["difft", "--color=always", "--display=side-by-side-show-both", "$left", "$right"]
    merge-editor = ["/Applications/p4merge.app/Contents/MacOS/p4merge", "-nl", "Theirs", "-nb", "Base", "-nr", "Mine", "$base", "$left", "$right", "$output" ]

I started using this today, and it's pretty amazing. Thank you!

I know many people who like p4merge and have used it as their mergetool in git

> Graphical diffs that automatically handle merge conflicts visually with clicks to insert, undo and the ability for custom modification are MUCH MUCH more convenient with a GUI

Not saying you are wrong, I used to only use VSC Gui for merge conflicts. Then at some point learned to edit myself and just use the CLI. After many many years I tried lazygit (TUI) for merge conflicts while still being in the terminal and I don’t think I can go back to do it manually anymore.

My point is, is this TUI considered graphical?

Same concept. The TUI is attempting to imitate what GUI does with pixels as primitives but with terminal character primitives.

Your opinion is not fact.

Prove it’s an opinion with your own anecdotal experience.

I would say that my opinion is shared by the overwhelming majority in such an overwhelming way that it’s indistinguishable from fact.

Anecdata don't make facts

It’s better than nothing. If he has something better than nothing he’d present it. I doubt he does though.

This is basically my workflow too. I use git from the command line until I need to resolve a merge conflict, then I hop into vscode to resolve the conflicting file.

I don't consider myself a very core or talented developer, but I do feel quite strongly that git from the cmd line is much easier than a GUI, but overall ridiculously hard regardless. The abstractions and visualizations in graphical interfaces is either too dense & complicated, or more likely hides what's actually happening; there's no way to reduce the inherient complexity.

My take: don't play the game. learn your basic required workflow from the command line and use the decent documentation to look up everything else.

NB. I did explicitly say a GUI on top of a cli app is a broken approach. Your intuition comes from this -- that the git API is cli-first.

Source control should be designed graphically first, with a cli to automate. I routinely use tree-view and column view in macos finder to think-through fs organisation -- doing this as a sequence of cli commands would be masochistic.

Notice how all the best vcs tutorials are just providing basic visuals which would be better as the interface.

I've been using magit for almost a decade now and it directly contradicts what you're saying simply by existing and being as awesome as it is

I thought I would be just fine with the CLI but I was amazed by magit. A GUI can work well if it leans into the strengths of GUIs - discoverability of features and showing state. Magit does all of these exceptionally well. It helps that git's CLI is quite poorly designed with a lot of unintuitively named commands. How do you undo a commit? How to unstage a file? What's a stash? What's the difference between log and reflog?

With magit I've been able to do things I wouldn't bother before, like reverting small parts of hunks from past commits, doing partial staging of files (not including all changes), and dealing with stashes effectively.

The thing that CLI have over GUI is programmability, which for programmers is a valuable property. As for me, any repeatable task, I automate away with various degree of effort and quality. If I find myself needing a particular set of commands and flag, I create an alias, a function, or a shell script for that, like `flac2mp3.sh` instead of hunting down through the shell history.

For most vcs tutorial, they don't often use why the history of changes is important, instead focusing on a set of usual commands. Why, not how. Once you have that philosophy down, the tool usage become much more efficient.

I work in a lot of repos at once. I do a lot of global search-and-replacing and random debugging. With SourceTree, I can easily see all the changes I've made across all repos in one glance.

I can then drill down to each file with the visual diff and see whether the changes are something I want to check in, or just debugging. If it's debugging code, I can click "Discard Changes" to drop all changes I've made to that file. Or I can selectively discard a hunk or discard lines.

When I show these features to command line purists, they always concede that this can't easily be done with the command line. So I don't see what's to gain if I'm losing those features, which I rely on constantly.

I've been working in SourceTree for a decade, so I know all the quirks by now, which I pass on to any new devs who want to use it.

> can't easily be done with the command line.

    git add -p

?

Learning the -p was the biggest gain I’ve had after years of using git via cmdline only.

Which is kind of the point. If a GUI editor does this stuff for you, that seems like a win over incrementally learning these little command line tricks that save you a bunch of time.

That’s fine for some and I have no problems with it but my mind doesn’t work that way and instead it asked “how is possible the UI is doing this”. All of that lead to learning what hunks are and manually editing them to learn.

You can do it with stash too!

How does this scan a bunch of repos at once and let me see all the changes at a glance, and then drill down to individual files to either discard the changes (revert back to their committed state) or check them in?

All git add -p does is that last part from what I can tell. I'd still have to cd into each repo and run git status one by one (I've made changes to up to 10 repos before for one tweak), and then do a git add -p to the changes I do want, and a git stash to the changes I don't and then delete the stash.

If "cd" and "git status" in a bash for loop is too advanced, you might need a GUI. Though I'd also argue that you've got too many separate git repos if you're finding yourself needing to do that often. It all depends on where you are on the journey to Monorepoland.

We're too small to implement a monorepo, because no one has time to build the tools we'd need to do it right. I still don't see what I gain by cd-ing into all those directories and running git status and looking at a bunch of text results, when I can just glance at the SourceTree repo window and see all the repos I've touched.

I'm just saying it might be a skill issue rather than a tool issue.

You're not offering any benefit that I'd get from using the command line over my current process, except, apparently, being able to express your superiority over GUI users.

I would argue that "git add -p" is the one thing which is unambiguously better with a GUI.

Scrolling through changes and staging lines is just much nicer with a mouse.

I semi-agree - the real win is in unstaging changes you didn't mean to stage! Much easier in a GUI, because I don't have to remember the non-symmetric CLI command.

It bothers me a lot that you're complaining about downvotes when the comment you are replying to isn't even greyed out let alone flagged dead.

It bothers me a lot that you can't discuss something like this without turning it into personal attacks. People can't just have different preferences than you. No it has to be "elitists" with "stockholm syndrome". This kind of rhetoric is unbecoming of this forum and destroys amicable discussion.

Have you considered that maybe people use the command line because it is better for them, and they recommend it to others because in their view, you'll need it eventually so why not learn now?

You can visualise a git history with a gui tool while still learning the command line interface btw. They aren't mutually exclusive. Do you just use scratch too? Or are you one of those elitists using textual programming languages? Must be stockholm syndrome...

There's a really good argument to use plaintext - it lends itself to very efficient use through searching, matching and replacing, whether interactively or in bulk. The lack of structure and semantics in a pure plaintext representation is often a curse, but sometimes a blessing.

At the same time, I'll go further than you, GP and GGP - I'd say that insisting on coding in plaintext, specifically on always directly reading and editing the same plaintext, single-source-of-truth representation of a program, is fundamentally limiting our ability to manage complexity, and makes people waste a lot of time on faux-problems like "lots of small vs. few big functions", or "exceptions vs. result types", etc.

FWIW, plaintext is still okay for most coding use cases - it's trying to fit everything into the same source code and somehow keep it readable that's an impossibility.

GUI's are bad for expressing tasks beyond some level of complexity.