7 Best Free Alternative Git Clients
Git
is an open source distributed version control system which
was originally designed by Linus Torvalds, the creator of Linux, in
2005 for Linux kernel development. This control system is widely used
by the open source community, handling small to extremely large
projects with an emphasis on speed and efficiency, but maintaining
flexibility, scalability, and guaranteeing data integrity.
Git is one of a number of open source revision control systems
available for Linux. Other popular tools in this field include
Subversion,
Bazaar,
Mercurial,
Monotone,
CVS,
and SVN. However, Git is frequently regarded by many developers to be
the finest version control tool available.
There are two official Git tools that are part of the main Git
repository each designed for a different job. Git-gui is a Tcl/Tk-based
graphical user interface that concentrates on commit generation and
single file annotation. gitk is a repository browser that is also
written in Tcl/tk. Whilst these two tools, used in conjunction, offer
reasonable access to the power of Git, they lack integration, and
functionality that other Git clients provide.
The purpose of this article is to provide an insight into the
best free open source Git clients that are available. We have covered
the best graphical and console based
clients available, so hopefully there will be something here of
interest
for anyone involved in the development of software projects.
One Git client that has not been included in this article but
is definitely worth of a mention is SmartGit, a Java-based user
interface that is ideally suited for both beginners and advanced users
alike. Unfortunately, SmartGit is not open source software, and
requires the purchase of a license for commercial usage.
There are a large number of projects that use Git to aid their
development. Notable examples include the Linux kernel, Eclipse,
Wine, X.org,
Ruby on Rails, ALSA, Bacula,
Drupal,
FreeRADIUS,
Puppet,
VLC,
and many more.
Now, let's explore the 7 Git clients at
hand. For each title we have compiled its own portal page, a full
description with an in-depth analysis of its features, a screenshot of
the software in action, together with links to relevant resources and
reviews. We give our highest recommendation to QGit, gitg, and git-cola.
| Graphical GIT Clients |
| QGit |
QT based Git viewer |
| gitg |
Fast
Git repository browser for the GNOME desktop |
| git-cola |
Feature-laden carbonated Git browser |
| RabbitVCS |
A
set
of graphical tools for Subversion and Git |
| Giggle |
Gtk frontend to the Git content tracker |
| Console GIT Clients |
| tig |
ncurses-based Git repository browser |
| Magit |
Emacs
interface for Git |
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Last Updated Sunday, March 24 2013 @ 05:06 PM EST
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