Hacker News Reader

Comment by Cthulhu_ | Hacker News Reader

One can argue semantics whether you call it a UI or a CLI, but hey. There's a number of GUI clients out there that depending on your criteria could be considered better. They're usually not as powerful as the CLI client though, and if they are, features like accessing the reflog are hard to find and use. There's also a few alternative CLIs out there, I've just done a quick googling and came across http://www.saintsjd.com/2012/01/a-better-ui-for-git/ and http://www.kennethreitz.org/essays/legit-the-sexy-git-cli.

Personally I prefer the CLI, it's the only tool that I can rely on to do what I tell it to do and to know what's happening. But it takes time and effort to get used to it.

View on HN

> One can argue semantics whether you call it a UI or a CLI, but hey.

In the same way one can argue whether you call a braeburn a fruit or an apple.

CLI is a subset of UI

I prefer git CLI mostly, except for merge conflicts. Exclusively for git merge conficts I use IDEA IDE resources. Otherwise CLI is my friend because I feel safe (git push and git commit have the best color-coded messages in most OSes)

A CLI is a user interface.

The problem with Git (well, one of many many problems with Git) is that it conflates its user interface with machine interfaces-- which means tools that have to work with Git (like those GUI clients) have to use the CLI to do so. They don't have a more powerful option, like an officially-supported API or a shared library they could call into. This is terrible software design.

libgit2 [1]

In fact, there exist many alternative 'frontends' to Git. There are even protocol translators like Hg-Git [2], and many importers that typically use the fast-import format to ingest Git-impl primitives [3]

[1] https://libgit2.github.com/

[2] http://hg-git.github.io/

[3] https://github.com/frej/fast-export

libgit2 is not official, not in-sync with the main Git tool development, and doesn't support many of the features Git supports. So no, it isn't a solution to the problem.

Separating the UI and machine interface is something that should have been done from day one. In fact, I've been told Git's codebase actually already does that (it just doesn't expose the machine interface to the outside world.) Human beings are not machines. They have entirely different needs.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com