I am starting on project with a friend and this will be the first time either of us has worked in a collaboration. We both work in IntelliJ, neither of us has much experience with GitHub. My question is this, my partner refuses to set up GitHub in IntelliJ as he finds the GUI too unfamiliar and would prefer to do all GitHub requests via the command line while I prefer to do it all through IntelliJ GUI. I know that in IntelliJ I can see files color coded based on the various states while my partner can not. Does anyone have experience with this? Should we both be using GitHub the same way or is the way we are doing it fine. I'm anticipating issues by us having different methods but honestly don't know enough to know if I am being overly anxious of problems or have valid concerns.
The tool you use to handle your git repository doesn't affect your collaborator's workflow - as long as your tool and the server properly behave.
Multi-language IDEs like IntelliJ tend to have some configurations for each project to know if, ie, git capabilities are enabled for that project or not. If your IDE is colouring files to tell you their git status, then you have those capabilities enabled. If your teammate's isn't, he has them disabled. That's all.
You probably are not versioning those IDE specific configurations, so that's why you have different settings. But that's no problem at all for collaboration.