Question

I am new got GIT and we are going to start using it at work (migrating from SVN used with Eclipse).

My question is:

In the long run, what is smarter? Learn using GIT via multiple GUI applications, using multiple GUI applications and the command line or just go full and pure command line?

Is it worth spending time to be crazy good with GIT only using the command line commands? Can you do everything with command line? The down side is that its just waste of time – and just plain stupid to go command line 2010.

or is it smarter to mix both command line and GUI applications depending on what I should do? The downside of that is you will be crippled without your GUI applications.

Any comments are appreciated.

Update: Visualize branches is of course done with GUI-applications, but for every day work:

• Only GUIs?
• GUIs/command line?
• Only command line?

Answer 1

Personally, I use the command line and gitk. The only time I really use git gui is when I need to stage only a few files that I’ve changed, and I’ve changed a lot of other files, such that using git add -i . really isn’t practical.

Anywho, I’d learn the command line first. Once you know your way around the Git commands you won’t want a fancy GUI at all. But don’t be shy of using gitk --all to visualize the repository, especially if you are a visual learner (like me). Understanding what your commands are doing by seeing their effect on the repository commit graph can be a very powerful learning aid.