Is there a way to see what commands git-gui is executing? Either in some status bar, or log perhaps? That would be really useful for learning the command line better.
Yes. git-gui accepts a --trace
option which will make it print each git command it executes on stderr. If you are running on Windows where there is no stderr, then it also shows the Tk console and this output is visible there. On Windows you can also show the console with Ctrl-F2 even without the --trace option if you want to do some debugging on the running application. On other systems, stderr will appear in the console window you launched the application from. If you used a desktop icon or shortcut, you might want to start a terminal window and start it manually to see the output (unix or macos).