I'm searching for compelling git and Mercurial clients on Mac OS X. The most clients I've found so far were less compelling as I expected. Some of the clients are programmed even in ruby or tcl/tk, which IMO aren't good OSX citizens in regard of integration in the OS.
I've clients in mind similar to Versions.app or Cornetstone which are subversion-only clients. Perhaps somebody got an insider tip for me.
It's commercial but I use Araxis Merge. I've used it on Windows, there's a very similar clone called Meld for Linux which I've used for years and the Mac version is very solid too.
It's pretty handy to have the same (or very nearly the same) too on all three platforms.
I'm more familiar with Mercurial than git so I'm very comfortable recommending it with Hg. As an aside, I'm guessing that you know how the hg extdiff command works but if not post a comment.
Chris
The main cocoa git gui apps are gitx and gitnub... But I figure you've already seen them... Do you have specific issues with them?
(edit - granted, neither of these can perform a git clone yet; they take over after a clone is created...)
Now TortoiseHg project ports to Mac OS X. It used GTK+ as GUI toolkit, so it works on major platforms.
For a graphical Mercurial client on Mac OS X, take a look at Murky.
I typically use the command line along with BBEdit for viewing my diffs.
Enable the extdiff extension by adding the following line to the [extensions] section of your .hgrc file:
extdiff=
Then add a section below
[extdiff]
cmd.bbdiff = bbdiff
opts.bbdiff = --wait --resume
Now when you execute hg bbdiff the changed files will be diffed one at a time in BBEdit.
Honestly, there's nothing with the polish of Versions or Cornerstone for git, Mercurial or Bazaar yet. Maybe someone will change that in the future, but for right now if you want a graphical client you'll have to settle for something like GitX or Murky.
Speaking specifically about Versions, other people haven't found this, but I've experienced a lot of crashes with it. Murky had a big crash the first time I used it, but the author makes it clear he's releasing it 'as-is' and that it works for him, and TortoiseHg is the last one I'd try (and am trying) because I'm used to it crashing on the PC side.
Murky looks about as good as anything, however, and has some good UI design. Depends if you want shell integration however.
For Mercurial, you should take a look at the newly released MacHg client. It uses the native GUI toolkit for Mac and comes with its own bundled version of Mercurial. It is very polished:
There are many more screenshots available.
I started a 21-day trial of SourceTree a couple of days ago (first public release was October 26th). I already prefer it to the other three well-known Mac OS GUIs for Mercurial, but I'm new to Mercurial and therefore not a power user. It most closely resembles Murky. It was very easy to get it up and running and its balance between features and simplicity suits my tastes very well.
I have no association with the developer other than being very happy with how quickly he's been responding to the issues I've raised.