nice tips. many times i make small commits and then use rebase -i HEAD~4 or instead of 4, whichever number of commits i wanna go back and rename/squash/reorder.
another good one is bisect if someone doesnt know. look into it. perfect for finding which commit broke something.
for commits i use gitx on osx because it highlights per word diff.
I already do most of these because of magit. It is in fact worth to learn Emacs just so that you can use magit. Much easier than messing around with git's command line.
For OS X I highly recommend the lightweight Gitbox. Although I haven't seen an update in a long time, there are some visual issues in Yosemite, and it crashes from time to time, it makes the most common tasks super easy. Single keystrokes to pull/push, add all, commit, etc.