It is helpful, and sometimes still necessary, to know how to use the command line. Once you start collaborating with other users, managing multiple branches in the same project, and performing complex merges, you will want another, more powerful Git client. For simple operations such as committing and pushing changes to GitHub, this will be sufficient. A Git client and the RStudio IDE are not necessary to use Git or R, but they make the experience more pleasant by reducing the steep learning curve. Git and a Git client are not the same thing, just like R and RStudio are not the same thing. Essentially, this is a helper client because it helps you interface with Git and GitHub but still uses the same underlying Git commands. Using a GUI interface, rather than the command line, will be extremely helpful when getting started.

Just as those of you transitioning from a graphical user interface (GUI) statistical software like Stata or SPSS will discover, adapting to a command line interface is difficult. Learning how and why to use version control can be rough.

Git gui tools for mac