August 9th, 2024

Magit 4.0 Released

Magit 4.0 has been released after three years, featuring new commands and improved functionality. The creator seeks community support for financial sustainability and plans more frequent updates.

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Magit 4.0 has been released after three years of development, featuring 1,077 commits. Magit is a text-based Git interface for Emacs that enhances user workflows with context-sensitive commands and advanced features. The release includes around three dozen new commands and improved functionality, such as context-sensitive right-click menus. The development process faced challenges due to the need for compatibility with other packages, particularly Forge, which underwent significant refactoring. The creator, Jonas Bernoulli, expressed a commitment to more frequent releases in the future, aiming for eight per year. He also highlighted the importance of user feedback in improving the tool and acknowledged the challenges of sustaining his work financially. Bernoulli emphasized the need for community support to continue developing Magit and other Emacs projects, as his income relies on user donations. He aspires to find 1,000 supporters to achieve a sustainable living as a free and open-source software developer.

- Magit 4.0 was released with 1,077 commits after three years.

- The update includes new commands and improved user interface features.

- Future releases are planned to occur every one to two months.

- The creator seeks community support to sustain his work financially.

- User feedback is crucial for ongoing improvements to Magit.

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11 comments

By @turboponyy - 5 months

Magit is possibly one of the best pieces of software ever written. Its discoverable and intuitive interface makes complex operations trivial and trivial operations blazingly fast and frictionless. The interface you use does matter. Magit greatly reduces the overhead for most Git operations, and, as such, has undoubtedly made me a more proficient Git user by making it easier to materialize my thoughts, experiment, and feel confident performing operations I otherwise would second guess - to a degree that I doubt other interfaces could replicate. Magit holds your hand, whilst not abstracting away Git's internals. It can not be praised enough.

By @bananapub - 5 months

it's sort of hard to explain how good magit actually is unless you've sat down and spent some time using it. it's just so incredibly pleasant to use; for selecting text to stage (select, s), for fixing a missing file from a commit (s, c, e), seeing per word diffs for the current file, show inline blame, rebase current branch on upstream (r p), automatically add changes to a magic ref/ so git can provide a persistent non-volatile undo log (magit-wip-mode) etc. it's just logical and pleasant and right there in my editor, never getting in the way.

it's so good I use it to work with git even when I'm not using emacs. it's so good I barely remember how to use it conciously because my fingers just know which keys to press in a row to do things. it's so good I donate money for something that hasn't had a release in three years.

By @cmrdporcupine - 5 months

There's a kind of "Magit Imitation" project https://github.com/altsem/gitu that aims to do what it does but sans-emacs. And it's ... fine... but what I realized once I started playing with it was that a large part of what makes magit.. magic... is the editor / buffers being right there.

I've still not fully absorbed magit, and mostly just use the command line and the emacs interactive git rebase mode, but I go in there once in a while. And wow. So cool.

There's also 'legit' for lem, the Emacsen written in Common Lisp. https://github.com/lem-project/lem/blob/main/extensions/legi...

By @darby_nine - 5 months

By far the best git client money can buy. And it's free!

(Please support the developer)

By @contrarian1234 - 5 months

It's nice the developer is squashing the last bugs that affect 0.1% of users ... But it's understandable he's having funding issues

Like.. Is there someone also working full time on dired? (and should there be?)

The description of the protracted refractor of a tangle of libraries just smells of yakshaving

I've been using Magit for years and... While it very handy and nice, from my perspective, it's been a "done" mode for a long long time.

By @rpoisel - 5 months

I have tried various git clients and this one is by far the best. Bold statement, but I think it's worth learning Emacs just to be able to use it. :-)

By @hazn - 5 months

Congratulations to the magit peeps for the release!

I always wanted to try magit, but I never learned emacs. Gitu is an amazing alternative that is inspired by magit and works with arrow-keys/vim motions: https://github.com/altsem/gitu

By @TomasEkeli - 5 months

highly recommend edamagit in vscode for those over here.

except there's currently a bug that stops commit from working (c - c) when developing in wsl or a devcontainer, hopefully it'll be fixed soon. BUT if you're developing directly on your machine it is an excellent interface to git.

By @aidenn0 - 5 months

I've bounced off of magit several times, but been told by many people whom I trust that it is superior. Maybe I'll take this as an opportunity to try to use it again.

By @createaccount99 - 5 months

Magit is overhyped