What and why

Learning how and why to use version control can be rough at first. I found the use of a GUI – as opposed to the command line – extremely helpful when I was getting started. I call this sort of helper application a Git client. Actually I call it a Git(Hub) client because they also help you interact with GitHub.

Git and your Git client are not the same thing, just like R and RStudio are not the same thing. A Git client and the RStudio IDE are not necessary to use to Git or R, respectively, but they make the experience more pleasant.

RStudio offers a very basic Git client. I use this often for simple operations, but you probably want another, more powerful one as well.

Fair warning: for some things, you will have to use the command line. But the more powerful your Git client is, the less often this happens.

Fantastic news: because all of the clients are just forming and exectuing Git commands on your behalf, you don’t have to pick one. You can literally do one operation from the command line, do another from RStudio, and another from SourceTree, one after the other, and it just works.

Recommendations for Git clients

This work is licensed under the CC BY-NC 3.0 Creative Commons License.