Why Git

Git is the most popular distributed version control system (DVCS) today. Compared to centralized systems, DVCS have all information locally available. This gives you following advantages:

• speed: no need to transfer, e.g., log information over a slow network just to see the file history
• network independence: you can work on your project and commit changes without having remote access to your central server (you can synchronize it later)

Git makes branching, merging and switching branches very easy and fast.

Why SmartGit

Git has very powerful concepts and commands, however getting started with Git can be hard due to this overwhelming set of functions.

• SmartGit is as easy to use as possible. For example, you never need to enter the hard to remember, long SHA ID to identify a commit — but you simply select it.
• SmartGit contains all needed functionality¹ to start out of the box. No further external tools, like SSH client, file compare or file merge are required.

1. SmartGit only requires a Java Runtime Environment 1.5 or higher and the Git command line tools.