I used to be a hard-core command line only (no fancy shmancy UIs here GitX!) git user. I have also been an emacs user for 23 years. Since I discovered Magit I will not touch command line git anymore. It's that good. Single key-press for all major features, easily add arguments the same way, and q quits any temp buffer for viewing. Diffs and reviewing history is a breeze. It's exactly what I would expect git + emacs to be. If you haven't tried it, do so and give it some time. There is a cheat sheet here:

http://daemianmack.com/magit-cheatsheet.html

That should get you well on your way to using Magit.

This might be the best user interface available to Git anywhere. It doesn't just make git easier, or more intuitive, but also makes you a more effective git user.

Highly recommended.

I'm curious though if there are many Emacs users who don't know about magit already.

Most Emacsers know magit, but many git users may not have considered to use Emacs.

I used Emacs and Git for years before hearing about Magit, never occurred to me that I needed something like that. I was wrong.

Just to list one killer feature: instant fixup. Apply your staged changes as a fixup to any earlier commit, doing all the steps of stashing and rebasing for you.

Also, makes partial staging so easy, and applying individual hunks from, say, a stash.

This is one of emacs' killer apps. I know some people (myself included) who use sometimes emacs just for this, even if we have to use Xcode or another tool to actually write the code.

I try to avoid it, but I keep thinking of Emacs as "an app store" for developers. For a product or service or tool targeted at programmers, it is hard to think of a better combination of ease of delivery, a highly correlated demographic, and narrow focus.

Emacs has a packaging system with repositories.

http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs?action=browse;id=MarmaladeRep...

I agree. I was thinking more about "Emacs lifestyle" utilities like SX [1] as very similar to StackExchange's Android app. [2] Sure it's actually a repository, but a language community without an Emacs mode may not meet a significant segment of developers.

[1]: http://stackapps.com/questions/3950/sx-stack-exchange-for-em...

[2]: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.stackexcha...

Magit is the best git ui out there, more powerful than the git command client w/o getting in your way.

Is this the interface that Stallman wanted to modify to eliminate the difference between "add" and "commit"?

No, he was talking about vc-mode, which tries to abstract away all of the underlying VCS to make it all look like CVS or Subversion. Honestly, rms had a poing there, because vc-mode really should make git look like a centralised VCS.

Oh right, here's the thread: https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2015-03/msg00...

just gave it a try: i love it!