Enhanced Productivity with Git for Developers

Open source Git clients and utilities to enhance your productivity.

Photo by Roman Synkevych on Unsplash

Overview

Regardless of your roles or programming languages used, Git is used by everyone for version control. In this article let’s explore some of the Git-related tools and utilities that can improve our development workflow.

Built-in Tools

By default, Git comes with built-in GUI tools for committing (git-gui) and browsing (gitk).

gitk — The Git repository browser

gitk displays changes in a repository or a selected set of commits. This includes visualizing the commit-graph, showing information related to each commit, and the files in the trees of each revision.

gitk

E.g., Show the changes during the 2 days.

gitk --since="2 days ago"

Show the changes during the last 2 weeks for the file init.lua.

gitk --since="2 weeks ago" -- init.lua

Show maximum 3 changes for the file init.lua.

gitk — max-count=3 — all — init.lua

git-gui — A portable graphical interface to Git

git-gui is a Tcl/Tk-based graphical user interface to Git. git-gui focuses on allowing users to make changes to their repository by making new commits, amending existing ones, creating branches, performing local merges, and fetching/pushing to remote repositories.

git-gui

git-gui: Git Blame

E.g., Git blame for the file init.lua.

git gui blame init.lua

Show a browser for the tree of the main branch. Files selected in the browser can be viewed with the internal blame viewer.