I like GIT GUI clients. It’s not that I don’t understand the GIT CLI commands. I do and it’s important to know what’s happening behind the scenes. It’s just that I enjoy using a good GIT GUI much more than using the CLI. I don’t avoid using the CLI, sometimes it’s more convenient. But most of the time I tend to do most tasks in a GIT GUI. It usually also gives me a good overview of the repos I’m working with.
So which are my favorite GUI clients? For a long time it was GitKraken . I even bought a t-shirt! But then they went bad. They would no longer allow usage of their product free of charge for non-public repositories. That is in itself fine but they have a subscription based licensing model. I do not tolerate that at all (looking at you Adobe). So GitKraken had to go.
For a while I tried using Atlassian Sourcetree . If I remember correctly I had extreme difficulties connecting it to GitLab . As a workoaround I used Bitbucket . But GitLab was, and still is, my preferred GIT hosting service. So I had my eyes open for alternatives.
Along came Fork . I noticed it sometime in 2019. It’s a client for Windows and Mac. It is feature rich, pretty and free. Well, it was free. Now they want you to pay for the client. It’s a one-time payment, no subscription, so I’m all for it. Since it’s only $49 it’s well worth the money. The problem is, they don’t support Linux and they don’t plan to in the foreseeable future .
So what do we have on Linux? To be fair, not too much when it comes to GIT GUI clients. But there is a shining star (except GitKraken), SmartGit . Their license permits usage free of charge by Open Source developers, teachers and their students, or for hobby, non-paid usage. Otherwise they too have a subscription model.
So for now I use Fork on Windows and SmartGit on Linux. I would like to use Fork also on Linux but that might never be. So I will probably end up ditching Fork in favour of SmartGit on Windows/Mac as well. SmartGit supports both Linux, Mac and Windows.