GitKraken - Getting Started with powerful Git GUI Client

Git is a famous open-source version control system originally developed in 2005 by Linus Torvalds, the famous creator of the Linux operating system kernel.

Most of the companies from small startups to fortune 500 use this open-source version control system in their workflow.

In addition to being distributed, Git has been designed with performance, security, and flexibility in mind.

For the basic level of version control workflow, Git is easy to use and understand. When we move to Git operations like branching, merging, and rebasing understanding Git can be hard at this point.

Using Git on CLI is not easy for anyone. So in this tutorial, we will be getting started with the GitKraken Git GUI client and simplify the hard steps of Git using the powerful Git GUI client called Gitkraken.

So let's get started with GitKraken.

Step 1 - Install GitKraken Git GUI

You have to follow these three steps:

Download Legendary Git GUI client for Windows, Mac & Linux.
Install GitKraken on your system.
and, Use GitKraken

No Git tools are required for GitKraken, so once you’ve run the installer, you can open the app and get going.

It works directly with your repositories with no dependencies—you don’t even need to have Git installed on your system. GitKraken is built with NodeGit, a Git framework that is primarily developed and maintained by members of the GitKraken development team.

Step 2 - Working with Repo

After successfully installing and login into your GitKraken app you will visit a simple interface with lots of easy-to-understand options.

There you can:

Open an existing code repo.
Clone a repo from URL or different cloud-based Git platform providers like GitHub, GitLab, BitBucket, Azure DevOps, etc. All options are available there.
Start your own repo with Git init without any CLI.

Choose wisely between your options and open a repo in the GitKraken.

GitKraken GUI interface — GitKraken GUI Interface (Source - GitKraken.com)

Step 3 - Understanding the Interface

From left to right, GitKraken displays a left reference panel, center graph, and the Commit Panel when working with a repository.

When using the Git on CLI we interact with many commands like init, commit, merge, branch, rebase, etc.

In the above beautiful interface, we can see all the Git operations labeled in the left panel.

With the help of the Commit graph and all the operations in the Left panel, we can use all the possible operations on Git with the help of this GUI client.

Conclusion

In this tutorial, we learned about using GitKraken Git GUI to simplify our version control system workflow in our project. Now you can download, set up, and understand the GitKraken interface easily.

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