I'm sick to death of hiring people from other companies and explaining GitFlow and why its useful (what are you people doing?).

Then watching them doing it wrong, pointing out its easier to use something like sourcetree. Which leads to "... well see, the terminal is just more efficient, tools like sourcetree are bloated".

Ok fair enough, well heres the deal i'll make with you, while using your "efficient tool", stop breaking our workflow and i'm fine for you to keep using it. Otherwise, stop being a dick and be a team player.

GUI tools allow you to see what is going to prevent mistakes.

Never really got the whole 'if you aren't using a terminal for everything then you suck' argument.

I usually use a GUI (Gitkraken in my case) to keep an overview over what's going on in the repo. Also it's convenient for things like pulling in remote commits as it automatically stashes and reapplys your changes. More complicated stuff happens in the terminal

@nblackburn another dev using a Git gui? ... never thought I'd see another ... thank you sir for restoring my fate in man kind

@practiseSafeHex Yup, mainly use a GUI not because I can't use the terminal but because that's why interfaces were invented.

They are intuitive and make things easier and better for everyone.

SourceTree's UI is intuitive? Hmm, maybe there was an update.

I prefer the command line but I don't force it on anyone.

@practiseSafeHex, I also use SourceTree to check what I'm adding to a commit or when I need to log or blame to ask my teammates about something. For actual commits and pushes and such I use terminal.

If everyone thought like you, there would not be something called devRant ☺

@klonky hhhmm, no devRant, but I also wouldn't have high blood pressure. That's a hard one

Gitkraken is great, honestly. I use the terminal for all of my commits and such, but for getting a quick overview, reviewing progress, and creating new branches, Gitkraken is my go-to. Terminal is easy enough, but having the GUI front-end makes project and workflow management much less stressful for me.

My two cents, I used to be an advocate for GUIs, and for the most part they're pretty awesome and keeping track of your repo state so you don't have to.

Then we had a junior dev who hadn't used git before, so we taught him git using one of the GUI programs. Honestly, it was too high level because he still didn't understand what git did for him over FTP.

Long story short, he completely wasted a long running branch of one of the senior developers who had recently wiped out his local copy (also using a GUI) in order to clean up his state. He lost about a week's worth of work. That senior developer quit.

It was several people's fault, not just the junior developer, in fact almost least of all the junior developer, or the GUI program.

I think that everyone should at least learn the command line. Once they have a good handle for most of the more advanced workflow commands, which should only take a few weeks, then a GUI becomes an excellent tool.

@tytho Oh yes, I highly encourage you are comfortable using git before using a GUI so you know what it is doing in the background and know what to do in cases where the UI can't help.

@tytho, I completely agree. There's no substitute for knowledge and understanding.

It sucks that the senior dev quit, but I honestly hope he wasn't the only one who was headed out the door. Whoever allowed that junior dev to work on a live project, was out of their minds. Let him break stuff on a meaningless git cloned repo, not something that's in production. Absolute madness - madness I say!

If you use command line you know what you are doing and you will be most likely more efficient than using a GUI. I started with a GUI and I now exclusively use the command line as it should be.

@skein but what if you need to remember like 5 commands to do something that takes one action with a GUI? Provided the GUI isn't a complete and utter mess. GitKraken is pretty solid and makes branching and merging a breeze, it's just a shame that it's no longer free for 'commercial' use.

@Rocket3G it's a couple quid, it's absolutely worth it

You can claim its more efficient all you want. I've had too many people using terminal not knowing how to create a feature branch, putting them in the wrong folders, not adhering to naming conventions, not knowing how to manage a release and so on.

All of these things are single button clicks in GUI's. The time I've wasted fixing workflows and re explaining processes far out weighs any efficiency claims, which I don't believe anyway.

I also learned GIT through GUI's like sourcetree, and had to teach terminal users about release management time and time again. Learning terminal first doesn't improve understanding, if you have an idiot not paying attention, they won't get it no matter what they use.

I also think suggesting typing clone, commit and push, vs clicking the buttons named the same, somehow improves understanding is ridiculous

@qbalsdon I've never had any issues with sourcetree's UI. The massive "Commit" "Push" and "Fetch" buttons are as about as intuitive as the laws of physics allows

@practiseSafeHex oh ok so it hasn't been updated. The first things I would like to know are origin, branch, head - having big buttons that perform major operations when the user doesn't know where their head is can lead to quite a lot of knots. (Puns most certainly intended)

I am not saying it's a bad product, and if it helps you get the job done, please use it. I just happen to prefer command line.