The one that came with git really doesn't work well. My suspicion is that this problem has more to do with Snow Leopard than the git gui.

Type git gui on the command line. The prompt does not return. The result is variable. Today, nothing happened. Well, I got a git icon in my taskbar. For a while it bounced up and down. Now it is doing nothing. Click on it, and I get the following.

That quit button works. But the menu on the top of my desktop has the Quit Git Gui entry shaded out. In fact, most of the menu entries are grayed-out. I quit by issuing a Control-C in the command window in which I invoked git gui. The prompt returned.

Type git gui again. Now the git screen comes up; remember, it didn't before.

So I click on Open Existing Repository and browse to guess what, an existing repository and click Open.

Note the menu bar. It says Git Gui Apple Repository ... Now when it first came up, it didn't look like the figure below. I clicked on Amend Last Commit. This caused the filename to appear in Staged Changes. I then clicked on the filename, and its text appeared in the upper right pane. The change is shown in green.

Two things are key here. One, most of the menu entries are still disabled. Two, the menu bar is what it is. It will change soon.

Click on New Commit. Then, right click in the empty space of the upper right pane and choose Options. An options window appears. Click Save. The options window goes away. Now the menu entries are no longer disabled. Sigh. Does this make sense? Not to me.

Click on Repository and from the dropdown, choose Create Desktop Icon. Give the Desktop Icon a name and click Save. Then Click on Git Gui and choose Exit.

Now open the Desktop Icon. Note now that the menu bar entries are different. And now git gui seems to operate as it should.

None of this makes sense to me. This is not the gui I want to use.

So what am I going to use? I installed Textmate's git bundle. So far it looks good. I'll also check out the git plugin for Eclipse.