A great supplement to your git command-line skills

I rated this five stars based on how I use it: as a supplement to the command line.

If you are looking for a do-it-all git program that possibly saves you from understanding what you are doing, this program is probably not it.

If you are able to do git work on the command line but would like a to supplement some tasks with a GUI, this app is great.

I use it for watching my staging area and for committing. The GUI makes it easy to see what’s staged and what isn’t, and more importantly, lets me launch FileDiff on each file with a double-click so that before I commit I can give each file that last once-over to be sure I haven’t left in any stray debug calls or TODO comments. I can easily run backwards in history and do the same for previous commits, and I find it just faster and smoother for this sort of thing than the command line or viewing on GitHub.

It can do much more than this, and I sometimes use those other features, but the main reason I value and recommend Gitbox is that it’s such a great tool for reviewing staged or committed changes.

In comparison with the open-source GitX I prefer Gitbox for the tasks I mentioned above. It’s straightforward, lightweight, stays out of my way, and doesn’t go into weird resource-consumption spasms like GitX sometimes does. I tend to reserve GitX for those times when I really need its branch-visualization capabilities, which Gitbox does not match.

episiarch about Gitbox