Features wise: They are even.

You are right that github has a bigger community but how often do you just randomly start searching for projects to fork? Most serious devs will have an account on both to make forking easier.

@ Alexei Matyushkin:

Yeah, I saw that. Little too late for Shamus. I wish he had waited a bit. :P

@ Travis McCrea:

GitHub is free for public projects and it has better community/collaboration features, hence that’s where the cool kids hang out. BitBucket has free private repos which is very nice, but less of a focus on community. It’s just a matter of taste I guess. That said, it’s easier to get exposure for your project on GitHub, seeing how everyone and their mom has an account there. :)

Alexei beat me to the recent github client built for Windows, but if it’s anything like the Mac version — count me out. I have really fallen in love with SourceTree (Mac App), it’s beautiful, it works with Github AND BitBucket (it’s made by the team that makes BitBucket), and it’s very easy to figure out while remaining functional.

Speaking of which, I have been moving development to bitbucket from GitHub. Call me a Techno-Hipster, but bitbucket is cheaper (free, usually) — and equally awesome.

JFYI: http://windows.github.com/ was recently released.

One more command for a git newb, “git status.” I’m not going to lie, I practically spam it (this is probaly because I don’t do things like put my git files source control and so my global ignore files are different every where). It breaks out the untracked, changed but unstaged, and staged files. It helps to show the schema git uses with files. I really enjoy the staging feature over the svn changesets, it’s more fluid and intuitive to me.

@ Alexei Matyushkin:

Yeah, the shell in modern distros like Ubuntu is quite a joy to use. When I jump back to my mac or to Cygwin on windows, I always miss these little niceties.

Btw, mounting flash drives via GUI actually works quite well on my Kubntu machine. It’s actually one of the things where I hardly ever use the shell – I just see a thing pop up, click on it and I’m set.

@ Stefanie:

Hey, I think you might be onto something. Maybe we need something like git-tutor. :) That said comparing git to vim is a bit unfair. Git was released in 2005 so it is still fairly young. Vim has been around since 91 and it was based on vi which was released in the 70’s. So vim is essentially a product of 30 years of steady improvement. It makes sense that user experience is better – it should be.

@ Stefanie: It’s not so easy as you think. I mean yeah for small programs is walk in the park but when you get on to complex stuffs it just gets too hard. That’s why even seasoned programmers struggle with it at times.

William,
web designing bangalore

True, race bikes don’t come with training wheels, but I don’t know if that’s an appropriate comparison here. Vim is also a very sophisticated tool, but it comes with vimtutor which makes it much more accessible. I think git also needs something like that.

I know next to nothing about programming, but I use both vim and git for my LaTeX files. For me learning vim was a much more pleasant experience than learning git. Thanks to vimtutor I quickly understood the absolute basics and then I gradually discovered the more advanced featuers as I was using it. But git was really frustrating, and although I figured it out in the end I still find it very complicated and opaque. Still, I find it surprising that even seasoned programmers struggle with it.

Hello,

first of all I wouldn’t say “you can’t just intuit your way around it and wing” about all that command line stuff. The shell you use nowadays is likely has completion. The commands themselves are named in more intuitive way, than the “where the hell in the menu is that bloody item hidden”. Furthermore, when I feel totally lost in “how this is to be done” I issue e.g. ‘apt-search source control’ command and always yield a lot of hints even without need to google.

Otherwise, the approach we all geeks are stuck with, is merely suitable for persons who get used with GUI. My wife, for instance, switched to Ubuntu two years ago and while she is absolutely lucky with it, she still doesn’t have the terminal window always running. Even the Unity’s “GUI as you type” interface is not so impressive for her as for me. And if there were not these guys who is giving up things which are not click-click-done—we were still need to dance around mkdir /mnt/flashdisk && mount woodoo.

BTW, my sixth item in the list would be git stash.

@ Chris Wellons:

I’m guessing Magit is probably much like Vim’s Fugitive that is a Vim wrapper around Git commands. I usually use it for the :Gdiff command that runs git diff and opens both files in side by side diff buffers, using full color and highlights.

And yeah – if you have read Shamus’ autobiography thing you can see he somehow bypassed the whole Linux adventure most geeks embark on around college time. Curiously enough, his wife uses Ubuntu apparently. So yeah, go figure.

Also, good job on improving the icon. :)