Magit is Amazing

32 points by munksgaard

technomancy

I definitely would have long ago switched to mercurial or fossil or pijul or whatever if it hadn't been for magit. Absolute treasure.

masklinn

The existence of magit is definitely a major roadblock to my usage of jj.
- slot
  
  I do wonder about that as well. A lot of the praise I have heard about jj is among the lines of "well it's really easy to stage hunks now -- just make some changes and slice them into proper commits later on!", but that's sort of how I've done it for ages just using magit
- steveklabnik
  
  You’re not the only one! It’s chill, you should use the tools you enjoy :)
  - masklinn
    
    The problem is that I really enjoy both magit and jj >:(
- erock
  
  I need vim fugitive but JJ
- skykanin
  
  This exists, although I've never used it myself: https://github.com/bolivier/jj-mode.el
  - munksgaard
    
    There's also jujutsu.el and jujutsushi.
- dzwdz
  Are people upvoting this only for the title? The story doesn't really say anything.
  
  I've been curious about Magit for a while, because I've heard really high praises about it, but I never understood what it did that vim-fugitive didn't do. The latter is neat, but also not that amazing.
  
  I did decide to finally give Magit a shot the other day, and here are some random thoughts:
  
  It's much more "interactive" than vim-fugitive
  
  Instead of having a flat buffer I can collapse and uncollapse sections of it.
  
  There's great builtin help under ?, and it helpfully tells you all the available options when you're halfway through a command. It's much more discoverable than vim-fugitive.
  
  I can select text in diffs and easily act on it in a natural way ...but tbh I don't really know how vim-fugitive compares here. Maybe it's actually just as powerful, but I just never figured out what it can do (see what I said about discoverability).
  
  The "default view" shows me the recent log and my stashes, which is a very tiny detail but also makes it much easier to get my bearings when I open up my editor.
  
  The blame view is much nicer than the one in vim-fugitive. The latter is pretty janky, and I was often falling back on the web UI of whatever forge I was using.
  
  Overall it's just way more polished, and pretty damn pleasant to use. I still use vim as my main editor, but since giving Magit a shot I've started coding in Emacs too from time to time. idk, it's neat
  - vpr
    
    The genius of magit actually doesn't have anything to with magit, or emacs even; it's about the "UX" library underlying it, transient.
    
    It's the balance between discoverability and speed for common operations. I can pause at any time and see the full list of modifiers I can apply to any given command, otherwise it's C C *commit message* C-c C-c which from a keystroke perspective seems fairly close to optimal.
    
    Keyboard driven selection forms are for me one of the crown jewels of UX design: allow very fast operation/muscle memory whilst simultaneously clearly expose other options when you occasionally need to perform an unusual operation.
    
    Transient is one of the UX libraries that truly wow'ed me, I think that's where the magic really hits. I have never used this, and it's so easy. I've been using this for a day, and it's so fast.
    
    nextos
    
    Emacs has a few really well-thought UIs similar to (Notmuch) or directly using transient (GPTel).
    
    Notmuch is IMHO an extremely clever take on email, not just at UI level.
    
    terinjokes
    
    I really enjoy using Gnus, for emails, mailing lists, RSS feeds, and even custom groups for things like reviewing pull requests. Since I use it for much more than just email, it's hard to switch to notmuch or mu4e.
    
    One of these days, however, I need to add some transient pop-ups because it's pretty hard to discover things, especially things I don't do often.
    
    miro
    
    for Neovim users there's Neogit.
    
    st3fan
    
    I use Neogit and it definitely has a very Magit vibe to it.
    
    mccd
    
    An external tool that is quite similar is tig. I switched to it when I moved away from Emacs. It works really well with vim but especially with Kakoune in daemon mode, as I can use tig to grep, jump to current file I'm modifying, easily commit changes, while keeping my Kakoune session active.
    
    rplacy
    
    Whose git?
    
    pwab
    
    funny! aside: pronunciation of magit in the mouths of colleagues tend to sound the same is "magic", which positively reinforces how it feels to use it
    
    pwab
    
    Maybe I don't understand the point of jujutsu, but I remember having exactly the same thought: "wait! I need to adopt a whole-ass new VCS for what is really the work of some porcelain?"