TortoiseGit is free open source software, and is under active development. If you like and use TortoiseSVN, you’ll probably find this worth a try. This is an attempt to port TortoiseSVN to git, yielding TortoiseGit. Mike Rowe (a reader) helpfully suggested this msysgit tour, which is very helpful though a bit dated. That was a long time ago for me, but might be Right Now for people reading this post. I could have really used a video walkthrough of how to be productive with it, back when I was starting out. My biggest gripe with msysgit (and its GUI) is that I had to figure out how to use it effectively myself. There is even a portable (zero-install) version available. It is under active development, and keeps up with the upstream Git versions reasonably well. If you don’t know where to start, or if you want a Linux-like Git experience, start with msysgit and learn to use its tools. I don’t mind the ugly (I get my fix of stylish software over on my Mac…), and I find the features ample for most work. These tools are a bit ugly, but have good and useful functionality. Msysgit includes the same Tk-based GUI tools as Git on Linux: a commit tool and a repo-browse tool, plus a bit of shell integration to active the GUI by right-clicking in Windows Explorer, plus a new thing call git-cheetah, which appears to be heading toward Tortoise-style integration. It is based on MSYS, so it fits in the Windows ecosystem a bit better than the cygwin Git port. Msysgit is the main project which ships a Windows port of Git. There is also a very long list of Git tools on the main Git wiki but that page is just a list, without any other information. I can offer this list of choices, though, along with some thoughts about them. I use msysgit (and its included GUI) most often myself, but I don’t have a clear answer as to which is the “best” Git GUI for Windows.

Since then I’ve switched to 75% Mac OSX, but I still use Git on Windows for a few projects, and I get a lot of questions about Git on Windows. I adopted Git as my primary source control tool a couple of years ago, when I was using Windows as my primary (90%) desktop OS.

Best git gui tools