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Comment by paulddraper | Hacker News Reader

> with no care in the world about version control (rsync does most of what I need: backups)

I get the simplicity...but using git/hg/svn is just so easy. And you can easily rewind, diff, view changelogs for a file, etc.

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I am not convinced that git is easy... I believe it's very powerful if you put the time into learning it, but anything with 50,000 separate guides on the internet must be somewhat unintuitive, right?

Eh I couldn't rebase to save my life but basic git is fairly easy to grok and useful.

It’s exactly like merging but you have to resolve any conflicts commit-by-commit instead of all at once in a merge commit. Useful for if you’ve been working on a feature and want to pull in changes your colleagues have made on the develop or master branch without muddying up your history with merge commits. Having clean history makes diffing easier for code reviews. I’ll admit even after years of rebasing, I still screw it up from time to time.

Definitely are way more intricacies to the cli than I'll ever learn, but 99.7% (estimated) of my git usage is running the same 4-5 commands all day, which I have aliased to convenient acronyms. Don't even have to think about it.

The other stuff is there if you need it though.

Use a GUI like SourceTree from Atlassian, makes dealing with "git" so much easier.

I’ve still been unable to find something that has the right balance of intuitiveness as well as surfacing advanced features and workflows besides SourceTree. The only downside is that SourceTree is slow and buggy at times.

Not to mention it lacks certain useful features like being able to change the head but the convenience factor won me over anyhow in the end.

Not necessarily, you can also use it just like CVS in the old days, with 2-4 commands, should be enough for your needs.

I agree that managing complex workflows, or really any situation involving a lot of contributors/branches/activity may send you running to your nearest search engine with regularity.

That being said, for GP's use, they can work solely from master, requiring only a few commands with little to no chance of difficulty.

That seems more of a function of how popular it is. But I can’t even remember learning git anymore; maybe it is hard to learn.

There are 50,000+ ways to learn anything, and most won't work for most people. Sometimes I have to read 20 different takes on something before it finally clicks.

The fact that there are so many people trying to explain it in their own way is a good sign.

You can write off something as being hard if lots of people want to help you learn it and share their tips and advice, but then you're just ruling out learning anything worthwhile, really.

Git does 50,000 things, but to get started on your local machine you only need 4 commands.

When you're setting up for the first time:

  git init

When you've made a change you want to keep:

  vim foo.txt
  git add foo.txt
  git commit -m "Add foo.txt to project to enhance synergy"

When you did something wrong and want to go back to when you last ran git commit:

  git checkout foo.txt

Everything else builds on top of that workflow.

How many Python guides are on the internet?

git takes typing more commands and bothering about the repo.

rsync is run by cron.

If you want to do something dirty, you could schedule commits with cron.

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