lazygit

Lazygit puts a visual interface on top of git right in your terminal. You see your branches, commits, staged files, and diffs all at once, and you navigate with keyboard shortcuts instead of typing commands.

MIT license. This is one of the most popular developer tools on GitHub, period. It doesn't replace git; it makes git usable for humans. Interactive rebase becomes drag-and-drop. Cherry-picking is a keypress. Resolving merge conflicts shows you both sides with a visual diff.

Fully free. No paid tier, no account, no telemetry. Install it with your package manager and run it. Works on Mac, Linux, and Windows.

The catch: there's a learning curve to lazygit's own keybindings; you're trading git command memorization for lazygit shortcut memorization. And it's a TUI (terminal user interface), not a GUI; if you want a graphical git client with mouse support, look at GitKraken or Fork. But for developers who live in the terminal, this is the git interface that should have existed from day one.