How do you create a new project/repository?

A git repository is simply a directory containing a special .git directory.

This is different from "centralised" version-control systems (like subversion), where a "repository" is hosted on a remote server, which you checkout into a "working copy" directory. With git, your working copy is the repository.

Simply run git init in the directory which contains the files you wish to track.

For example,

cd ~/code/project001/
git init

This creates a .git (hidden) folder in the current directory.

To make a new project, run git init with an additional argument (the name of the directory to be created):

git init project002

(This is equivalent to: mkdir project002 && cd project002 && git init)

To check if the current current path is within a git repository, simply run git status - if it's not a repository, it will report "fatal: Not a git repository"

You could also list the .git directory, and check it contains files/directories similar to the following:

$ ls .git
HEAD         config       hooks/       objects/
branches/    description  info/        refs/

If for whatever reason you wish to "de-git" a repository (you wish to stop using git to track that project). Simply remove the .git directory at the base level of the repository.

cd ~/code/project001/
rm -rf .git/

Caution: This will destroy all revision history, all your tags, everything git has done. It will not touch the "current" files (the files you can currently see), but previous changes, deleted files and so on will be unrecoverable!

Correct, the 1.7.12.4 (Apple Git-37) does not come with gitk. You can install a more recent version of git + git-ui as a separate formula by using brew. More thorough instructions located here: http://www.moncefbelyamani.com/how-to-install-xcode-homebrew-git-rvm-ruby-on-mac/ (see this commit extracting git-gui/gitk into its own formula: https://github.com/Homebrew/homebrew-core/commit/dfa3ccf1e7d3901e371b5140b935839ba9d8b706)

Run the following commands at the terminal:

brew update
brew install git
brew install git-gui

If you get an error indicating it could not link git, then you may need to change permissions/owners of the files it mentions.

Once completed, run:

type -a git

And make sure it shows:

/usr/local/bin/git

If it does not, run:

brew doctor

And make the path change to put /usr/local/bin earlier in the path. Now, gitk should be on your path (along with an updated version of git).