In Git, you’ll spend the majority of your time on the command line. As I said in the previous lunch, Git was born and bred on the command line. But now is a good time to explore how to interact with Git via its GUI. That’s right. Git ships with a GUI!
Command-line aficionados often look down their noses at the GUI (the somewhat derogatory abbreviation for graphical user interface, pronounced gooey). They take the stance that any tool without a command-line interface is a tool not worth using. But it’s worth exploring because the GUI does allow for a much richer user experience with Git by offering a better visualization of what’s happening in the repository. The git gui command makes it easy to visualize the state of the working directory. Making commits and visualizing the status is a one-window operation with this tool, and for some people, that’s a more comfortable way of working.
This chapter focuses on interacting with a few Git GUI features, such as creating a repository, adding and committing files, and viewing your repository’s history. You’ll learn the other features of Git GUI later, as you learn more about Git itself.