It’s certainly possible to control git from a command line. There may be times when it is necessary to do so. But, even though i may have a reputation as being one of the more rabid CLI people in the Dept, even I find that a good GUI helps me be productive with git.

For the most part, I’m going to talk about working with git from within Eclipse. But if you really don’t want to be tied to using a full-fledged IDE for this purpose, there are some specialized interfaces to git that you might take a look at this list and this longer list.[^Let me know if you find any of these particularly useful, especially for beginners, and I’ll add specific recommendations here.]