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Comment by MonkeyIsNull | Hacker News Reader

> I'm not 100% sure what's going on under the covers.

This. A thousand times over. I like to see exactly what git is doing and when; I don't want any magic stuff under the covers done for me.

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GitHub's GUI is the worst. It has a "sync" button.

As soon as I saw that button I knew I'd have trouble using it.. what will "sync" do? Push my branches? Pull tracking branches? Will merge commits get implicitly created? Or will it just fetch? From what servers? I didn't want to risk having my local master get pushed into production just because GH wants to make things easy for me, so I just quit it and went back to the CLI.

GitHub's Atom editor recently added git operations. I use Atom but haven't had the time to try the git wrapping. Has anyone else used it?

It just pushes the current branch afaik.

So they should just call it 'push'. The word 'sync' is not in the Git terminology.

In its defense, git terminology is stupid. It took me way too long to reason out what the fuck a pull request meant. To your starting developer it seems to indicate the opposite of what it does.

The GitHub desktop client is very limited and seems mostly geared toward a lone developer or small team who has never used git before. In this context I think it's a reasonable decision to use a more common verb.

Nope. That does no one any good. Using git verbage would, at the very least, acclimate them to very common terminology used by the rest of the folks they will eventually encounter.

Well, I disagree, because the alternative for many is probably no source control.

Folks writing production crap would opt for no source control? Well, fair enough I guess. But I (and probably most competent sw engineering folks) would never hire someone who was completely oblivious to using source control. So hopefully that 'practice' would die through attrition.

You've got to meet people where they are. Someone who is familiar with how git works is going to find the git GUI client way too limiting to seriously consider using it, whatever verb they use for the push function.

So it never pulls updates on the remote? That seems like pretty unexpected behaviour.

It pulls and then pushes, I guess I should say, but I was considering "pulls and..." part of the push operation.

CLI and GUI are both user interfaces and magic is in the eye of the beholder: if you know your tools, you can predict what will happen under the hood when you click on a button as much as when you submit a command (it's not magic anymore).

Personally, I use the CLI and often have no idea what I'm doing ;)

Even GUI based SQL tools show you a log of commands used... Git GUI clients don't even show you beforehand or after what the heck just happened... Sad.

It's definitely not true. I'm not sure what kind of gui did you use but both sourcetree and gitextensions show you the command log.

Guess I was wrong, but I never noticed said log. I use SourceTree.

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