It comes down to my ADHD brain being unable to handle the context switches with windows popping in and out, staged diff views, unstaged diff views, and the mental model of which state everything is currently in. Whereas with the CLI I type out the whole operation in advance and get a nice history of the steps I have taken before, with magit I need to build up on the fly with interactive feedback I have react to, or at the very least can get distracted by. My “just slow me down” maybe sounded like “I am so fast, magit can’t keep up”, whereas I meant it more like “I can’t keep up with magit and constantly have to recheck things and correct mistakes”. For example my preferred workflow is relatively git (add|reset|checkout) -p heavy, where I can make sure the changes that get staged match exactly what I want, with undo/redo working as expected since it’s just a normal text buffer, whereas with magit I’ll go into the diff and press s/u on lines/regions with things just popping in and out of existence and I have to go over to the opposite diff and reparse that to fix a mistake I made.

It’s very similar to other GUIs in that way for me. Or modal editing for example: I can’t for the life of me keep track of what mode the editor is in at any moment. With vim/evil I even had the muscle memory going at one point, but I would constantly type commands in insert mode and text into normal mode leading to all kinds of random things happening. I could be the fastest typist in the world and vim would still slow me down. However Emacs is perfect for designing a workflow to mitigate this, since it allows me to harmonize and simplify many of the keybindings to do similar things in all modes, customize window management (display-buffer-alist) to be less distracting and disable other distracting commands I don’t need entirely.

I’m a huge Emacs user and while I love some of the convenience features (editing the rebase-history, smerge-vc-next-conflict, etc.), but I rarely use magit, one of Emacs’ killer features, because I just still prefer the CLI over it. I usually know exactly what I want to do and menus, popups and hotkeys, no matter how good they are, just slow me down.

I think git is the obvious choice, both in ergonomics and flexibility (custom commands). But maybe I’m just using it so much I don’t recognize the sharp edges as much anymore.