GitHub recently released a new client for using Git on windows. I’ve pretty much stayed away from git myself, mainly because it’s been a real pain to use on windows. Mercurial works fine for me and quite honestly I think between the two, religious wars aside, it’s six of one half a dozen of the other.

That said I seem to like to abuse myself and try anything new and shiny, so I’ve spent a little time with GitHub for Windows. If nothing else I’ve been finding it interesting to see how developers are applying metro style techniques to more serious applications (e.g. not your regular consumer facing stuff.) It’s a nice little app, I love some of the unique ideas they have in there. Mainly little UI embellishments and the tight integration with github. Clearly a lot of thought was put into making some of the onerous git tasks one-click simple.

I’ll have to spend some more time with it to contrast with Tortoise Hg, my core version control tool of choice. Even though Tortoise Hg is a great tool, the general experience and UI design is not all that great. At the end of the day, if GitHub for Windows is a better tool and there is (mostly) underlying functional parity between the two DVCS systems, it’s worth considering a switch.