I used to be a hard-core command line only (no fancy shmancy UIs here GitX!) git user. I have also been an emacs user for 23 years. Since I discovered Magit I will not touch command line git anymore. It's that good. Single key-press for all major features, easily add arguments the same way, and q quits any temp buffer for viewing. Diffs and reviewing history is a breeze. It's exactly what I would expect git + emacs to be. If you haven't tried it, do so and give it some time. There is a cheat sheet here:
This might be the best user interface available to Git anywhere. It doesn't just make git easier, or more intuitive, but also makes you a more effective git user.
Highly recommended.
I'm curious though if there are many Emacs users who don't know about magit already.
Just to list one killer feature: instant fixup. Apply your staged changes as a fixup to any earlier commit, doing all the steps of stashing and rebasing for you.
Also, makes partial staging so easy, and applying individual hunks from, say, a stash.
This is one of emacs' killer apps. I know some people (myself included) who use sometimes emacs just for this, even if we have to use Xcode or another tool to actually write the code.
I try to avoid it, but I keep thinking of Emacs as "an app store" for developers. For a product or service or tool targeted at programmers, it is hard to think of a better combination of ease of delivery, a highly correlated demographic, and narrow focus.
I agree. I was thinking more about "Emacs lifestyle" utilities like SX [1] as very similar to StackExchange's Android app. [2] Sure it's actually a repository, but a language community without an Emacs mode may not meet a significant segment of developers.
No, he was talking about vc-mode, which tries to abstract away all of the underlying VCS to make it all look like CVS or Subversion. Honestly, rms had a poing there, because vc-mode really should make git look like a centralised VCS.
http://daemianmack.com/magit-cheatsheet.html
That should get you well on your way to using Magit.