A work-in-progress Magit clone for Neovim

* Takes fewer keypresses - it has a very nice nested menu system based on single keypresses, which has been split out as "transient" and adopted by a number of other packages.

* Is easier to discover - I've learned of the existence of many things you can do with git by coming across them in the TUI (which is easier and more contextually relevant at any given time than reading the entire command line documentation)

* Generates less cognitive load - the set of available parameters and their default values is immediately visible, not buried in arcane man pages (which open in a separate web browser on Windows)

* Gives far richer and more interactive feedback - when reading the output of git log, the full contents of each commit is a single keypress away, as is checking out the commit in question; code can be blamed in the editor with syntax highlighting; conflicts can be resolved similarly and opened in ediff with a keypress; files and individual hunks can be staged/unstaged with a single keypress when viewing status, etc, etc.

The convenience and completeness of this has been so great that I've not felt the need to memorise the git CLI beyond the absolute basics. To turn the question around, is there any reason I should? Performance is the biggest bugbear, but hasn't been a dealbreaker for me, despite being on Windows most of the time (I've recently started using lazygit to perform simple operations more quickly, though).

For me the most valued aspect is return on my investment for learning a tool... official git cli porcelain will be around for a _long_ time, it's available almost everywhere, it gives the most power and flexibility, I can combine it with all kinds of things for new problems - Magit (or otherwise) exists in a much narrower context, I know it's probably only a subset of git porcelain to smooth over the staging and committing etc, but I prefer to stay familiar with git cli... Perhaps more critically, I've already mastered 95% of the official git cli porcelain and then some, so I suppose from my perspective my return on investment for using yet another git porcelain feels fairly low, even for the specific case of staging, i've done it so much it's second nature, and I'm generally comfortable with the serial nature of globing files over the CLI.

I use gitui and while diffing could sometimes be better in vim, vim is a text editor and IMO not at all suited for this kind of task.

https://github.com/extrawurst/gitui

Because it is faster, has great visualization and most importantly magit has great fallbacks. You can still use the command line from magit! Pressing "!!" in a magit-status buffer will get you there, while still showing you all the nice info in the other buffers. I use it for "git submodule update --init --recursive" for example.

I have seen people struggling with git log and understanding which commit is on which branch and all that. Of course you can use something like "git log --decorate --graph --color --oneline --all" or even alias that. In magit I do: "mag-stat" (Emacs completes this to "magit-status") which one does usually anyway, to see where the repository is at and whether there are uncommited changes and so on. When I need the graph, I do: "mag-log" "-" "c" "b". Then I can go to any line in the graph and check it out, because it becomes the default for when I type "mag-check" (completed to magit-checkout) and press RET. On command line I would be copying commit ids and branch names and would remember to use my alias for the long git log command.

Edit: Another great feature is how easy it is to commit only some hunks, instead of everything that has changed. Commiting hunks on command line is tedious afaik. You would have to specify row numbers.