Git Client Applications

To interact with git, you can use the command line or you can use a desktop client application. (There are also mobile/tablet apps, but we won't cover that here.)

We recommend working with one of the following first two options.

• Command line. Purists will use the command line, for reasons they will pine eloquently about if asked. There are hundreds of resources online showing how to use all the git features via command line, starting with the links at the top of this page.

• SourceTree for Windows and Mac - this is another good free desktop application which does a good job of giving you access to all the power of git/github/bitbucket/mercurial in an easy visual interface. We highly recommend using SourceTree due to its simplicity. When you first set up SourceTree, it will ask you to log in to your Atlassian account. The account is free, and no side-effects, and no personal information needs to be provided besides name/email.

• There's another option, which we're NOT recommending here, as its UI is very complicated. Also (at the time of this writing) it has an important limitation when working with forked repositories: It doesn't support multiple remotes, which means you'll need to use the command line to keep your checkouts up to date with our central repository's branches else you'll have problems when issuing pull requests. That other option is github's own application: Github Desktop for Windows or Mac - these are free desktop applications written by Github, and make visual interaction easy when working only with your own repositories but not when regularly contributing to someone else's projects.

• While you won't find us documenting how to use them, there are several other git GUI client apps.