this post was submitted on 24 Feb 2026
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What do you use to communicate with your git repositories? (lemmy.dbzer0.com)
submitted 2 days ago by altkey@lemmy.dbzer0.com to c/git@programming.dev
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Do you use some GUI, TUI, terminal commands, plugins for other software?

Ideally, I want to find a cross-platform GUI app, preferably a FOSS one, and with as less overhead as possible, e.g. no Electron.

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[–] expr@piefed.social 2 points 20 hours ago (1 children)

Not sure what you're saying. Are you saying you need GUIs for diffs? Because that couldn't be further from the truth. Unified diff itself is highly underrated (and my preferred form for many reasons), but even if you wanted side-by-side diffs, there are many ways of accomplishing that without a GUI. That's the entire point of git difftool.

[–] ieGod@lemmy.zip 1 points 19 hours ago (1 children)

What I'm saying is that performing a diff via command line isn't something that brings as much utility as using a GUI. You can do it, but a major part of this utility is the visual aspect, layout, navigation. CLI tools don't come close to what I want. Isn't difftool meant to be used in GUI form? Am I missing something here?

[–] expr@piefed.social 1 points 1 hour ago

The default difftool is vimdiff, which is not a GUI program. But no, the point of difftool is to iterate through files to diff and pass the different versions to an external program. There are many external CLI and TUI diffing programs. The point, though, is that the git CLI is still the driver of everything and you still have the full range of options available to git diff, rather than some GUI program being the driver, which are universally limited in what they can do.

Personally, I load regular git diff output into a vim buffer via :read. Unified diff is largely superior to side by side diffs, IMO, because most of the time, changes in one file are accompanied by changes in a number of other files, so it's useful to be able to quickly follow a thread of changed calls or whatnot. And with unified diff output, you can see and manipulate hunks directly.