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Ask HN: Best Git GUI For Windows?

20 points by gchucky ↗ HN
At work all of our computers are Macs, so I've been using SourceTree (and before that, Tower). I run Windows at home, however, and haven't really found a good git GUI. I guess I'm happiest with SmartGit, but nothing really has the same slickness as SourceTree.

Are there any better clients out there that I don't know about? Are there any in alpha/beta that I could maybe test with?

18 comments

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kevingadd
TortoiseGit is probably the best choice. It's low-friction, integrates well with Explorer and with PuTTY, and makes it painless to drop into the command line and invoke git manually when you need to.

In particular, TortoiseGit offers excellent UI for commit, revert, log/reflog, merging, and patch management. It also has some built in UI for Git-SVN if you use that.

The Windows GitHub client is shaping up nicely if you use GitHub but it's still in beta and super unstable.

gemma
TortoiseGit gets a little funky with the shell icon overlays on Windows 7--don't expect them to always tell you the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth (http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1057734/tortoisesvn-icons...). It's also heavily biased toward SVN users, which will make some of the terminology confusing if you don't come from that background.

For my own workflow I prefer the command line, but GitExtensions (http://code.google.com/p/gitextensions/) is my go-to when I need a GUI (or more often, when I need to show a manager that there are, in fact, GUIs available).

[dead] sebbi
Depends what you need. I am happy with TortoiseGit. For me it doesn't get "slicker" as the GUI being the file explorer.
axemclion
I have used Eclipse's EGit, and it really works great !!
Smokymorgan
It does/did have a problem with remote pushes though...has that been fixed?
Avalaxy
I can recommend TortoiseGit, it's pretty good as far as I can tell. However, I still prefer the CLI for most tasks because it's just more flexible :)
stewars
Tortoise git is the windows git gui of choice at our work and is the one I recommend to install for our clients who use windows. Haven't tried any others though.

Since I know the command line client best, I always install msysgit first, set up ssh keys in "git bash" using ssh-keygen and then install tortoise git. Warning, if you use msysgit, make sure to not use the "plink" ssh that is installed with tortoise but use the msysgit one. That setup has had the least issues for us.

OiNutter
Used to use SmartGit at my last job and that generally worked pretty well. New places uses svn :( so have got familiar with TortoiseSVN, which works pretty well, so would imagine TortoiseGit would also be a good choice.
pithon
http://code.google.com/p/gitextensions/
vyrotek
Definitely git extensions. I tried both. In fact, I came from Tortoise SVN and found Tortoise Git to be terrible. I was just barely learning git at the same time. Everything finally clicked for me when I used Tortoise Git.
mjibson
I like the native git gui that comes with the default windows git install. It's simple but does 95% of what I need it to. Command line for the oddities.
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CodeMage
My best experience so far has been with a combination of SmartGit and TortoiseGit. SmartGit doesn't have interactive rebase and doesn't allow you to specify refspec when pushing. I've had to use the former occasionally and I use the latter all the time, because we work with Gerrit.

Of course, you could throw TortoiseGit out of this whole story if you don't need that kind of stuff or if you're comfortable with using command line for certain details.

tweaqslug
We use Plastic SCM as our UI and repo, but I hear it can connect to git (somewhat) seamlessly. The interface is very slick, and the user experience is great when you use the Plastic Repo, not sure how it translates when pulling from git though.
cnvogel
This might sound like a ugly workaround, but since I'm stuck with a windows-only compiler/IDE at work, I resorted to have my files put on a linux-machine and exported via samba to the windows computer.

I run git (and texteditor, scripts, ...) on said machine and the IDE is more or less only used for it's "Build" button.