I generally don't hear too many complaints about GIT in the Windows/.NET development world, probably because there are good UI front ends and there's not as much 'tough guy' cred from sticking to the CLI. Visual Studio does a decent job of abstracting the GIT nuances, but I personally use GIT Extensions, which looks and feels much better on Windows than the other cross platform UIs.
I drop to the CLI occasionally, especially for multi step or automated scripts, but you can pry a nice visual commit graph and full featured integrated diff viewer from my dead hands. GIT is powerful and option-laden; the perfect tool for a UI to aide in discoverability. The CLI feels like programming in a text editor vs a real IDE
> Visual Studio does a decent job of abstracting the GIT nuances, but I personally use GIT Extensions, which looks and feels much better on Windows than the other cross platform UIs.
IDEs and text editors sometimes have nice Git integrations in the UI, but I wanted standalone software that I can use for anything from various programming projects, to something like gamedev projects (with Git LFS) or arbitrary documents.
In the end, I just forked over some money for GitKraken, it's pretty good, especially with multiple accounts on the same platforms, when you want to switch between them easily: https://www.gitkraken.com/
For something more lightweight, I also enjoyed Git Cola on various OSes: https://git-cola.github.io/ Even Git documentation has a page on the software out there, a good deal of which is free and has good platform support: https://git-scm.com/downloads/guis
Quite frankly, I spend like 90% of the time using a GUI interface nowadays, when I want to easily merge things, or include very specific code blocks across multiple files in a commit, or handle most of the other common operations. Of course, sometimes there's a need to drop down to the CLI, but you're right that some GUI software feels like it actually improves the usability here.
This! Any graphical history for git that doesn't let you show all branches at once is trash. (Like the one in Visual Studio) The interactive rebase editor in Git Graph is very nice too.
I also love how smoothly you can jump between git CLI and GUI in VS Code.
I'll have to look at how to compare arbitrary commits in Git Lens and whether it is in the free version. That's the one thing I still rely upon TortoiseGit for
Vscode has a built-in (and quite good) 3-way merge editor, and an excellent editable diff view. GitLens also makes it easy to diff any two refs within vscode.
I really wish the 4.* release supported a dark theme, it's the only thing keeping me on the 3.* release, and I dread the day I'll have to switch for whatever reason...
I drop to the CLI occasionally, especially for multi step or automated scripts, but you can pry a nice visual commit graph and full featured integrated diff viewer from my dead hands. GIT is powerful and option-laden; the perfect tool for a UI to aide in discoverability. The CLI feels like programming in a text editor vs a real IDE