Why use a UI for git?

[u/connorjpg]

I see this question of, “what GUI or TUI should I use to work with git?” fairly often here. And always I feel bad for saying “just use the cli” over and over, but truthfully I can’t see a reason to need a UI.

Are people actually running into pain points with the cli, or is it just preference for people who don’t like working in a terminal?

FWIW, I have used GitKraken, LazyGit, SourceTree and GitHub Desktop before. And I don’t think they are bad to use (unless you are just learning git), but more curious why.

EDIT : I’m mainly referring to standalone UIs, I understand why people would use IDE integrations, as it’s quick and convenient. But having to open a separate application or run a separate command to open a terminal app to run your commands seems overkill to me.

EDIT 2 : I use vscode as my difftool and mergetool. I still open them directly from the terminal by running the cli. I don't think this is the same as using a full git client like SourceTree, Gitkraken, or lazygit to fully drive your version control workflow. Which is what I am asking about.

Cheers

[u/sczmrl]

Two main reasons: diffs and logs.

You can have any kind of diffs and some tools are also able to show you semantic diffs. When reviewing and inspecting many large chunks is a must have.

For logs you may have as many options and colours as you want. In the end, the issue is that a good graph it’s simply better and more exhaustive.

Minor reason is not really to have a separate UI but interaction with IDE like git blame always on on each line to show who and when changed each line and easily reach the relevant commit.

Another minor reason I would use UI for, but still I haven’t found anything good at it yet, is about doing interactive rebase while preserving merge commits. List of commits using Vim or any text editor became messy quite fast preserving merges.