A friend of mine asked me at lunch this week what I was using to interact or manipulate Git, and I think he might have been disappointed with my lack of sophistication. At this point, I’m not willing to cast aspersions on whatever folks use as long as they’re being effective in their own environment, and there are definitely folks with way more Git-fu than I have.
Offhand though, I tend to use:
- JetBrains Rider for making commits while I’m working just because it’s really easy because that’s just the window you’re already in. A quick “CMD-K” in my keyboard shortcut setup, type up the message, and hit return if nothing looks out of place. Honestly, I do far more amend commits just because of how easy that is with a user interface, and that might have actually changed my workflow a little bit from what it was 5 years ago.
- With a codebase that has a fast build, I’m might instead do it at the command line with a
[run build] && git commit -a -m "commit message" - If I really need to look closer at an ongoing commit or look closely at the recent change history, I’ll use the GitHub Desktop user interface.
- I pretty much only use GitHub Desktop for cherry picking or squashing commits — which I rarely do, but I will just happen to need here in the next hour
- For everything else, including pulls, pushes, and creating or deleting branches, I just do the 4-finger swipe over to an open terminal window and do it directly in the command line. Yes, you can certainly open a terminal window directly in Rider, but I just don’t have muscle memory for that
- Just to add yet another tool, I really like using VS Core for merge conflicts. For whatever reason, that feels the easiest to me
There you go, what I do here and there. Not particularly advanced, but I don’t feel like I have to spend much time at all with Git.
The Shade Tree Developer 