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Scripting and support for aliases is in my opinion a big advantage that native Git and the command line still have over a UI such as EGit. I know several Eclipse users who gladly accept the downsides of switching to a terminal for certain tasks, just because there they can access their accustomed scripts/aliases or because they want to have Git interact with another tool. This is because they have workflows that would otherwise require repetitive typing, or remembering long and complex commands. I have several such workflows myself. For example: - resetting to the parent of current HEAD (for me when I work with the Gerrit worfklow, but don't want my patch-sets to depend on each other) - checking out a branch and automatically fetch from the remote tracking - deleting .orig files (I like to keep these around for a bit, in case I make a mistake when manually resolving conflicts) - starting my preferred mergetool (see Gerrit: 50998) Why not implement these in Java and contribute them to EGit? For once, it is quite challenging to build a good UI, for a tool as powerful as Git, that works well for every reasonable workflow. Trying to support any workflow would likely make the UI cluttered and unusable. An even more obvious reason probably is the time investment. With EASE, in many cases it takes just a few minutes until a button appears that does what you want. All the management overhead included, and with minimal prior knowledge. It is very hard to compete with that turnaound in Java, even if you are an EGit committer, with a workspace all set up. EASE already has an EGit module that allows implementing such actions very quickly, and place a button somewhere to trigger them. To prevent this module (and in turn the user scripts) from breaking however, a lot of EGit would need to become API.
