7 Best Free Alternative Git Clients

This control system is widely used by the open source community, handling small to extremely large projects with an emphasis on speed and efficiency, but maintaining flexibility, scalability, and guaranteeing data integrity.

Git is one of a number of open source revision control systems available for Linux. Other popular tools in this field include Subversion, Bazaar, Mercurial, Monotone, CVS, and SVN. However, Git is frequently regarded by many developers to be the finest version control tool available.

There are two official Git tools that are part of the main Git repository each designed for a different job. Git-gui is a Tcl/Tk-based graphical user interface that concentrates on commit generation and single file annotation. gitk is a repository browser that is also written in Tcl/tk. Whilst these two tools, used in conjunction, offer reasonable access to the power of Git, they lack integration, and functionality that other Git clients provide.

The purpose of this article is to provide an insight into the best free open source Git clients that are available. We have covered the best graphical and console based clients available, so hopefully there will be something here of interest for anyone involved in the development of software projects.

One Git client that has not been included in this article but is definitely worth of a mention is SmartGit, a Java-based user interface that is ideally suited for both beginners and advanced users alike. Unfortunately, SmartGit is not open source software, and requires the purchase of a license for commercial usage.

There are a large number of projects that use Git to aid their development. Notable examples include the Linux kernel, Eclipse, Wine, X.org, Ruby on Rails, ALSA, Bacula, Drupal, FreeRADIUS, Puppet, VLC, and many more.

Now, let's explore the 7 Git clients at hand. For each title we have compiled its own portal page, a full description with an in-depth analysis of its features, a screenshot of the software in action, together with links to relevant resources and reviews. We give our highest recommendation to QGit, gitg, and git-cola.

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