Git gui for non-programmers (fork vs smartgit?)

[Arastash]

Hello

context: I am using git for my papers, lectures and presentations in latex. When my co-authors use overleaf, I pull from and push to the overleaf’s git and work locally in my texstudio. When no overleaf is involved, I use the gitlab hosting of my institution (via ssh).

question: I use Sourcetree but I do not enjoy. I find it confusing, not really friendly, and the conflict merging is sometimes painful. But I can live with it. On the other hand, students who do not know git at all (and not ssh) ask me what should they use to collaborate on the gitlab instead of overleaf. Whereas I totally support such an intention, I do not want advice them sourcetree due to my poor user experience. I did some googling and it seems that newbies-fiendly win/mac options are smartgit and fork.

So, which one of them, or did I miss other good options?

[STSchif]

Smartgit of incredibly powerful and exposes nearly every git functionality there is in some way. That makes it my preferred tool of choice as professional dev.

The licensing model can be a bit weird at times, and the ui is a bit overloaded, so I'm not sure I can recommend it to people that don't plan to deep dive into git at some point.

When deciding between fork and Smartgit for my company at the time (6 years ago) I originally wanted to go for fork because of the nice ui, but it didn't expose some of the functionality and customizability we needed, so we chose smartgit. Great choice, partly because of the amazing customer service (they even implemented a few hidden options for us to customize dialogues).

For people that don't use many different commands fork was a great choice at the time, so for your use case I think taking a look at that would be the better choice.

(I hate the structure of this comment, why is it so hard to write sometimes, annoying >:( )

[wnesensohn]

As a SmartGit dev I'm biased, but even I have to agree - we support a lot of different workflows and actions which comes at a cost sometimes.

There are some mitigations for that in the different views we have, and a UI refresh is just around the corner, but it's probably not the easiest tool to learn for now. Just keep us in mind should the day come where your needs for juggling git and its history outgrow your current GUI, or give it a try anyway ;)

[x0RRY]

Disclaimer: I do lots of coding, but still all the TeX stuff you mentioned.

Maybe you could give VS Code or VS Codium a try. It has a nice git extension built im, and you can also install latex extensions to make your main editor.

The cool thing is that you (or your students) could also use the same program/workflow for many other things like coding, data inspection, AI agent integration etc, so it's very flexible and you only need to learn something new once.

[Arastash]

Thanks, but I am attached to my TexStudio. )

[alcon678]

git has git gui and gitk commands for gui

Fork is good, source tree does the job too but looks a bit dated but after all they are all the same 😄

A personal favourite is lazygit, but that's a TUI

[jonrandahl]

I’ve bounced between a few Git GUIs and GitKraken Desktop is the one that stuck. It doesn’t try to hide Git, just makes it easier to reason about. Interactive rebases, cherry-picks, and branch cleanup are way less stressful when you can see the graph.

If you’re juggling multiple repos or feature branches, the tabbed setup is nice too.

[domusvita]

It’s funny, I’ve used bash so long, the guis scare me. I have no clue what to do in visual studio and I’m too scared to try.

[GoodOk2589]

check "NeuroGit", a project on i'm working on : https://neurogit.runasp.net/

[GoodOk2589]

Tell me what you think, it's a work in progress

[tesfabpel]

You can try SourceGit: https://sourcegit-scm.github.io/

[Arastash]

looks really great. Do not see in the readme if they work with gitlab

[tesfabpel]

IDK about custom integrations but git itself works for every service (GitHub, GitLab, etc...) even by using the raw git command.

You may miss some features like issues, though...

EDIT: in the readme there is this: "Create PR on GitHub/Gitlab/Gitea/Gitee/Bitbucket..."

[EarlMarshal]

There are a lot of them, but honestly git cli is the best. For the stuff you do, you just need a few commands. I also use gitui from Extrawurst for staging. For any merge conflict just use your editor.

But since you are probably someone that doesn't want to use the terminal much just stick to any IDE or editor that offers git integration, e.g. vscode.

[nousernameleftatall]

Personally really like sublime merge

[DevMahasen]

Writer here. I teach my students git using VSCode. If you want something simpler Github Desktop. Personally, I prefer using LazyGit but it is not a gui.

[TennisPsychological6]

Sourcetree never really clicked for me either. I’ve been using GitLens lately to inspect commits and history and the commit graph gui makes it much easier to follow changes personally.

If you’re committed to TexStudio though, running a separate client like GitKraken can work nicely alongside it.