A quick web search brings me to Magit’s page, which tells me that Magit is “A Git Porcelain inside Emacs” which just creates further questions. How does one make delicate pottery out of a version control system? In what circles is “a porcelain” a synonym for “user interface”?
The Git documentation refers to everything Nicely Shaped that is tacked on to the core git functionality as "porcelain" [0]. (Pretty much everything that we normally use when interacting with git counts as porcelain.)
I can get over "porcelain," but the Magit site would certainly benefit from better organization. You can skim the entire landing page without gaining much sense for what it's all about, and then it turns out that if you just click on the first screenshot on that page, you end up at "A visual walk-through" https://magit.vc/screenshots/, which is much more helpful. But you have to mouse over that screenshot and notice that the pointer changes in order to even realize that it's a link.
As far as I can tell, it's only in git circles. Git refers to its command line interface as "porcelain" to distinguish it from the "plumbing" that is the .git folder.
