I’ve always been critical on user interfaces. In two different senses.
Bad user interfaces drive me crazy: I think designing crappy user interfaces should be a criminal offence.
On the other hand, I’ve always been on the “command line side” when speaking about development tools.
Of course I use graphical editor (gvim is a graphical editor, and Emacs as well). But the center of my development is the shell. From the shell I call the editor, from the shell I run the build tools, etc etc etc. That’s to say I’m pretty “against” bloated IDE’s, even though recently I started some serious experimentation with Emacs, but that’s wholly another story.
Back to SCM I recently took some SCM classes (a whole course on source configuration management, indeed). And during the course, we had some lab exercises with Perforce. I never used Perforce before that: I knew there was this Perforce thing which was better than CVS but costed lots of $$$ and was closed source and if you used that you were almost as evil as if you used Windows.
In the meantime I got bore with the free software movement, started using the Mac (which is almost as evil as Microsoft) and lots of proprietary software which makes my life far easier. However, many teams switched to subversion (which is far better than CVS as well) and some times later I experienced the distributed SCM revolution. I started with git which I rapidly dropped favouring Mercurial.
Using Perforce seemed to me quite anti-climatic, in this sense. But Perforce had something I always desired in SCM tools. That is to say a very good graphical interface. Especially for version graphs. And a graphical merge tool. An integrated graphical merge tool, so that you don’t have to find one when on Windows, for example.
Moreover, branching is a breeze. The integrate command is something wonderful. Indeed I never used that much branching in my home projects. Now I just can’t thing how could I do without it. In this sense, the GUI is rather didactical: I just can explore menus and commands and learn new functions of my tool.
Moreover, installing the server is really easy (differently from subversion). And my dyndns powered machine can host all my work. Very interesting indeed.
I forgot to mention: as long as I use less than 2 users, I can use the Perforce server for free. Since they are my own projects...
