lazygit

lazygit makes git actually usable from the terminal. A TUI that turns staging, committing, branching, rebasing, and cherry-picking into keyboard-driven operations that take seconds instead of hunting through git man pages. At 75k stars, it's the most popular terminal git client for a reason.

tig is the OG terminal git viewer — great for reading history, less great for interactive operations. GitKraken is the polished GUI with Jira integration, but it's commercial and heavy. VS Code's built-in git is adequate for basics but clumsy for complex operations like interactive rebasing.

Use lazygit if you live in the terminal and want to move through git workflows at the speed of thought. Interactive rebasing, conflict resolution, and partial staging are where it truly shines.

The catch: it's a terminal tool — if you want drag-and-drop branch management or visual merge conflict editors, GitKraken's GUI is still superior. The keybindings have a learning curve (though a short one). And it doesn't integrate with issue trackers the way GitKraken does with Jira and GitHub Issues.