I was pretty skeptical about magit at first because I know all the basic git commands for my daily workflows by heart and I don't find them to be very difficult or slow to use. But since I am also an Emacs user and everybody kept telling me to try it out I finally forced myself to use it. And I must say it is very easy to pickup and use productively. It is way better than most of the git integration features you get with your typical IDE (like VScode for example) because magit supports most git workflows pretty seamlessly. It integrates itself nicely in Emacs' keyboard driven UI. So now I don't need to drop to a shell anymore to interact with git.
But does it make me much more productive? I don't know.
While developing typically I add some debug code mangled with the actual stuff. So when I am ready to commit I've got to remove that first. I had done this manually in the editor before, now from within magit I can just select the lines I'd like to stage and press "s". Then proceed to commit pressing "c". Finally, by just selecting the remaining lines and hitting "k" ("kill") I get rid of all debug code. That's pretty nice and I will never ever forget to remove debug code again. Similarly, you can manage your git stash with a couple of key strokes.
Branching and merging works well, too. But I don't think magit makes it much easier as you still need to type in branch names. Autocompletion is supported, but git provides this as well.
Merge collisions are still a pain. And for more complicated tasks like interactive rebases, reflog rescues or bisecting I still keep dropping to the shell. I actually like the expliciteness, here, because it prevents me to stupid things in dangerous maneuvers. And "git help" is always there to remind me on all gazillion command line arguments.
> I was pretty skeptical about magit at first because I know all the basic git commands for my daily workflows by heart and I don't find them to be very difficult or slow to use
Same here. I've found completing-read for branch names to be one of the biggest draws for Magit, personally. I can tab-complete them in my shell, but it's much slower and less reliable.
I find magit very nice for interactive rebases. The ability to instant fixup older commit is also nice.
But yes, I do drop to the shell for some actions when I know exactly the sequence of git commands that I need to execute. Also somehow I often use the shell to switch branches, some habits are hard to change.
But does it make me much more productive? I don't know.
While developing typically I add some debug code mangled with the actual stuff. So when I am ready to commit I've got to remove that first. I had done this manually in the editor before, now from within magit I can just select the lines I'd like to stage and press "s". Then proceed to commit pressing "c". Finally, by just selecting the remaining lines and hitting "k" ("kill") I get rid of all debug code. That's pretty nice and I will never ever forget to remove debug code again. Similarly, you can manage your git stash with a couple of key strokes.
Branching and merging works well, too. But I don't think magit makes it much easier as you still need to type in branch names. Autocompletion is supported, but git provides this as well.
Merge collisions are still a pain. And for more complicated tasks like interactive rebases, reflog rescues or bisecting I still keep dropping to the shell. I actually like the expliciteness, here, because it prevents me to stupid things in dangerous maneuvers. And "git help" is always there to remind me on all gazillion command line arguments.