Best visual client for Git on Mac OS X?

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/455698/best-visual-client-for-git-on-mac-os-x

When this question was asked, I think the correct answer was almost certainly gitx. Later in 2009, thebrotherbard fork of gitx would be the best choice.

However, now in 2011, several more visual git clients for the Mac have been released, and the competition is finally stiff. Until very recently, there was no git client for the Mac (or any other platform, for that matter) that was even remotely close to as polished and elegant as Subversion clients such as Versions or Cornerstone. But now there are several.

I no longer recommend gitx (or its forks). I was grateful for it in its day, but it has been eclipsed by some of these newcomers. Meanwhile, some of the older runner-up recommendations, like Gity, just never achieved enough traction to get very good, and their future doesn't look bright.

GitBox was the first of these recent clients that I heard of, and it is pretty good. It has fewer features, but is much more clean and solid-feeling than gitx. It is the only git client that has never once crashed on me--a good sign. But it's the only git client without the familiar lines-and-dots branch graphing, and it feels perhaps too simple. You wonder if its developer has the resources to really keep this app improving at a good pace. Can use external Mac diff/merge apps like FileMerge, Changes, BBEdit, etc. App Store or buy direct, $40. Update 2011-10-07: I no longer use GitBox, and most of the people I know who do are not programmers, but authors and such. It still is about the simplest UI out there.

Tower is a client I heard of just a day after I bought GitBox. This app seems awesome at first glance. It is easily the most attractive client, and very full featured. Great history view, pretty much has all the features I remember from gitx, but with an attractive Mac design (a la Versions). But then you crash into the single, jaw-dropping, earth-shattering design flaw: it can only view one repository at a time. Remove that crippling (and frankly weird) limitation, and I believe this would be the clear winner at present. But with that limitation, it's far from clear. It is also kind of slow, and for truly huge repositories it is so slow it doesn't work at all. Can use external Mac diff/merge apps. In free beta, pricing to be announced later. $59. Update 2011-10-07: I no longer use Tower much either, although it remains the prettiest. The one-repo-at-a-time limitation is too insane for me to deal with, though.

SourceTree is a tremendously promising client released in October 2010 and steadily improving since. Notably, it supports Mercurial as well as git, though I don't use hg and cannot comment on that. For git, it is fantastic, with a few unique features that really stand out. One is its Repositories window, which gives you a single place to see the status of ALL your repositories. Depending on your workflow, this can be really important. I work on about 20 different projects in a given week (several for work, including git submodules of my main project, plus various personal repos), and I work at the office and also at home and sometimes on the road. So each of my Macs has probably 30-40 repositories checked out, and SourceTree is the app I switch to when I need to quickly see if any of them have outstanding changes to push or upstream commits to pull. It also has some other various geeky power-user options for merge commits and rebasing and whatnot. Less attractive than Tower but with more power. Can use external Mac diff/merge apps. App Store or buy direct, £35.

Update 2011-10-07: SourceTree is good enough that it gradually displaced all other git clients. Developer Steve Streeting was productive and responsive, churning out stable improvements. This week, Atlassian (maker of JIRA and other stuff) announced that they had acquired SourceTree (and Steve Streeting). That is probably good news, because it means more resources behind ST. Even better, SourceTree is now free "for a limited time". So now there is really no reason not to get the best git client for Mac.

Those are the three best new clients, in my opinion. I use all three every week. SourceTree I leave running all the time, mainly for the useful view described above. Tower is the one I spend the most time in, using it for my main project. And GitBox is the one I command-tab to to quickly open some other project (my main project has many git submodules) to do a quick commit or pull or whatever. I now use mainly just SourceTree (and the command line git client sometimes).

There is no need to use only one git client. They are all good enough that when you switch to them they instantly see any commits or updates to the local repo, no matter which client made the changes. (Which is good, because none of them can totally replace git on the command line.) I find that these three clients each have unique benefits, and are the best things going on the Mac (currently).

The one that feels used to feel like it has the most momentum behind it is Tower--it looks the best, they push updates almost daily, and if they copied SourceTree's multi-repo view, fixed their performance issues, and could open more than one repository at once (really, what is up with that!!), I could conceive of just living in Tower all day. But I can't deal with the single-window thing, so I recommend either use all three like I do, or at least use each one for a couple days to figure out which best suits your workflow.

Update 2011-10-07: Another notable client is GitHub for Mac. I love our wild and wooly friends at GitHub as much as the next guy, but I think their client is pretty much doodoo. It has the same insane-in-the-membrane limitation as Tower, where you can only see a single repo at once. It can't just open an arbitrary repo via just opening a folder--you have to jump through hoops to add it to your repo list first, and even for that you have to switch to the Finder, find it, and add it via drag and drop (wtf?!). It has this Twitter-inspired iOS-wannabe interface that seems to prioritize lickability over usability. I think this product should probably have been called Hasbro™ My Little Pony® Baby's First Git Client instead. That is, of course, just my opinion though.