Developing in eclipse without using any git eclipse plugin?

Question

I've been using SVN and Eclipse for development for a while, and love the strong integration between the two. However I'm now switching over to git, and understand that while the git Eclipse plugins like EGit have gotten better, they're still not as good as SVN plugins for Eclipse. (For example, there's still no submodule support, and I plan to use submodules extensively.)

I'm wondering, are there any of you who use Eclipse for development on a git project but don't use the Eclipse plugin? Meaning, you either use another git GUI client (I'm on Linux) or do everything from the command line. If so, how does this work for you?

Is it a big pain not to be able to see directly in Eclipse which files are not synchronized with the repository, etc, or is that not such a big deal? Or can I still use EGit just to see which files have changed, but make all commits and do all operations from the command line or another GUI client? If so, could anyone who's doing that describe what such a workflow might look like.

Is there any risk or problems involved with accessing one repository from multiple clients, such as command line, EGit, and multiple git GUI clients - like could it cause repository corruption because they could all change metadata at the same time? Or is it perfectly safe?

With SVN everything was simple - I never needed the command line or another GUI client for anything. Everything was possible within Eclipse. But now I'm concerned about what to expect because I really don't know how this will change my development style or if it's doable. Certainly with git being such a popular VCS and Eclipse being such a popular IDE, there are many who use both together and who can describe for me how they use it.

Answer 1

EGit will play fairly well with the command line git tool. I use both on linux. It's still worth installing EGit, I think, and then at least you see the status of your projects.

Sometimes you have to use F5-Refresh to refresh EGit's view of your repo, but EGit already works at refreshing the workspace with local file changes, so it doesn't come up that often.

The only other suggestion that I have is that you wouldn't want multiple workspaces to point to the same git repo. That can cause confusion.