What is the best Git GUI on OSX?

Question

What is the best GUI on OSX for viewing a repository, and (optionally) manipulating it?

Answer 1

Terminal.app? :-)

Answer 2

@warren_s is right, in a sense. There doesn't really exist a nice, standalone application (like Versions for svn). Your best bet at this point is to get comfy in terminal.

Alternatively: use github.com (at least for viewing).

Answer 3

git-gui is bundled with git and should be exactly what you you're looking for. (gitk is an older app that isn't as functional or pretty.)

It's a Tcl/Tk app, so you may need to install some frameworks: http://tcltkaqua.sourceforge.net/

Having said all of this, I just use the command line too :) But this GUI is great for getting the hang of things before the cmdline options become familiar.

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Update some 18 months later.

These days I use Gitx for basic branch viewing and committing, and the command line for more complex tasks. I wrote this answer after just starting to use Git, and never actually used git-gui personally; at the time it answered the question, that's all.

Answer 4

If you are using git-gui, you might also find this project useful. It allows you to open git-gui on a location from the finder. Also, I would say that if you don't have a lot of experience with git, you should learn the command line stuff, as that will let you really get to know the ins and outs of git.

Answer 5

You could try gitnub. It's great for viewing git logs and looks very pretty.

Answer 6

I really like the git package for Textmate, but the best place to work with git is really the terminal.

Answer 7

gitx is nice. It's like gitk but with a real OS X interface.

Answer 8

There are two fairly popular ones. Both have a good deal of "pretty" to them, too :). I've used gitx occasionally, and never really used gitnub. If you care, both are pretty easy to compile, and I've included the git clone commands for each below.

gitx:

Homepage: http://gitx.frim.nl/
gitx on Github: http://github.com/pieter/gitx/tree/master
Git clone command: git clone git://github.com/pieter/gitx.git

gitnub:

Homepage (and github wiki): http://wiki.github.com/Caged/gitnub
Git clone command: git clone git://github.com/Caged/gitnub.git

Answer 9

I found out that there is a new Java based client, SmartGit, on the horizont.

SmartGit Website

Answer 10

try gity: http://macendeavor.com/

Answer 11

Tig is a useful git UI for viewing repositories. Not particularly graphical, however.

Answer 12

Good suggestions above, I would like to add to this also:

http://engineeredweb.com/blog/10/2/smartgit-best-git-gui-so-far
http://cola.tuxfamily.org/
https://git.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/MSysGit:GitCheetah#Git-Cheetah

Edit: there are also IDE's where there may be, or lacking git integration, what are your opinions on these?

Eclipse uses EGit (based on JGit, rumored not to be 100% git-compatible and a bit buggy) IntelliJ Idea git integration I have heard very good things about

Anyway, it is a very crucial issue, and I'd like to see it in general, not only for OS X (maybe there is on SO?). Edit: I've found these related issues:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1516720/git-gui-client-for-linux
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2141611/a-pretty-and-feature-rich-git-gui-for-linux
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/157476/what-guis-exist-for-git-on-windows
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/102102/are-there-any-good-cross-platform-mac-win32-nix-git-gui-clients

Last time I tried TortoiseGit (on Windows, of course) it was a terribly broken attempt at porting TortoiseSVN.

Nowhere have I really seen anything embracing reasonably normal (some call them "advanced") workflow steps like merge, rebase, diff, log and graph log all in the same GUI. I.e. I haven't yet found a GUI comprehensive enough to recommend to collegues wanting an alternative to learning to use git from the commandline.

Go on, bring in the flames.

Answer 13

Gity ( http://macendeavor.com/gity ) became opensource yesterday... I think i cost 20$ before.

Probably Gity is one of the best open-source git-guis available.

Answer 14

I use brotherbard's fork of GitX. So far it has served me well and has more features and UI than the latest stable build of the official GitX.

http://wiki.github.com/brotherbard/gitx/

Answer 15

I downloaded SmartGit from the above link provided by BastiBense and it works on my Mac OSX. I got the SmartGit version 1.5 and it is showing me the comparison views similar to Beyond and Compare on Windows.

Answer 16

http://gitbox.pierlis.com/

For those of you who are comfortable using the command line for complex tasks, but would like to have an elegant UI for the commands you spend 90% of your time using (add, commit, branch, push, pull).

Answer 17

I use GitX for staging, since you can stage single lines of codes very easily. You do not have to stage all changes from a single file. I use this feature alot.

Other than that i use the commandline aswell.

Answer 18

Better than Gitx: a gitx fork -> http://github.com/brotherbard/gitx

Answer 19

Another vote for GitX, although I installed a more experimental fork, Brotherbard's GitX fork at GitHub, which had more features than Pieter's original version (NB, these might have be pulled back into the original branch, please verify).