i use a gui for two things:

1. interactive staging and committing of only part of a local change. git-cola is way better than the command line flow for this

2. gitk's tree viewing and filtering options are nice. i usually end up just using tig for speed of opening, but if there's a large set of changes i want to navigate through i launch gitk. also it's the easiest way i've found to branch at a particular commit.

I magit in emacs, combined with git gutter. It's a good way to see your commits as you edit code.

But lots is still done on the command line. The two aren't mutually exclusive.

I used to be a cli proponent and it worked very well for moderately sized, hardly dynamic repos; for other repos that can see dozens of commits an hour it's much easier to use a GUI. I use it for easier rebasing and cherry-picking, because I can directly see what I'm taking and where I'm putting it, instead of having to first check the log, then copy the hash, then paste it with the right git incantation.

Sometimes using the mouse really is more powerful; sometimes it is not. It is important to see that it can sometimes be your friend.

> do you use some mix of command line and GUI?

This, for me. I do most git things through the command line, but I find Tower's GUI very convenient for reviewing my changed files before I commit them.

At that point, I'm basically looking at superficial issues. That's usually the step where I realize I've left some debugging statements in my code, or have some formatting issues that ought to be cleaned up.

Almost exclusively a command-line user too. The one GUI tool I sometimes use is tig -- I like its status view for staging parts of files at a time if I made too many changes at once.

GUIs are gmore discoverable than the command line so they are great when you need to do something that you don't do very often.