Because they are universally incapable of coming anywhere close to the full power of git.
I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had GUI-only people ask me to unfuck their repo (fortunately not at my current job, because everyone uses the CLI and actually knows what they’re doing). It’s an impedance to actually learning the tool.
Ultimately any GUI is a poor, leaky abstraction over git that restricts many of the things you can do for little actual benefit.
There’s nothing ‘archaic’ about git’s CLI. I think you might just be opposed to CLI’s in general, which is fine for a regular computer user, but paints a grim picture of your competency if you’re a developer.
I find the built in controls with visual studio supremely convenient.
After using git init --bare for the remote repo I use the built in git controls for branching and switching out as well as syncing and pushing. Why not, the button is right there and it’s literally faster.
As someone using git for the last 10 years by now: you’re wrong. No UI has managed to give me access to all the fuckery I often do very quickly on the command line. I was honestly surprised to see IntelliJ nowadays supports an interactive rebase, but reflog, which should be a basic git feature, is still not widely supported in most IDEs in 2025. Or adding, resetting or checking out files with regex. Setting up and modifying lfs. And these are all basic features, good luck doing something like using branch~n syntax for some of the operations etc.
Why learn a GUI that can change from release to release when I can learn a CLI once and be done with it. An additional plus is that CLIs are easier to script and automate.
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Mate… Theres maybe like 5 “git + singleword” commands that cover 99.999% of all of your uses of git. Its really not hard.
Because they are universally incapable of coming anywhere close to the full power of git.
I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had GUI-only people ask me to unfuck their repo (fortunately not at my current job, because everyone uses the CLI and actually knows what they’re doing). It’s an impedance to actually learning the tool.
Ultimately any GUI is a poor, leaky abstraction over git that restricts many of the things you can do for little actual benefit.
Most cli stuff is a lot easier than programming. If you can’t use cli then by definition you’re a shit programmer.
Of course if you simply don’t want to use cli that’s a different matter.
There’s nothing ‘archaic’ about git’s CLI. I think you might just be opposed to CLI’s in general, which is fine for a regular computer user, but paints a grim picture of your competency if you’re a developer.
That seems unnecessarily harsh.
I find the built in controls with visual studio supremely convenient.
After using git init --bare for the remote repo I use the built in git controls for branching and switching out as well as syncing and pushing. Why not, the button is right there and it’s literally faster.
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As someone using git for the last 10 years by now: you’re wrong. No UI has managed to give me access to all the fuckery I often do very quickly on the command line. I was honestly surprised to see IntelliJ nowadays supports an interactive rebase, but reflog, which should be a basic git feature, is still not widely supported in most IDEs in 2025. Or adding, resetting or checking out files with regex. Setting up and modifying lfs. And these are all basic features, good luck doing something like using branch~n syntax for some of the operations etc.
Git UI is shit and will be for a long time.
Why learn a GUI that can change from release to release when I can learn a CLI once and be done with it. An additional plus is that CLIs are easier to script and automate.