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Comment by marcodave | Hacker News Reader

But one of those shiny GUI was called GitHub, and it was the shiniest of the shiniest, so much that it make git usage ridiculously easy. At least on my experience.

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Git is very easy to use, right up to the moment when it really really is not.

Every SCM/SCC/VCS has a wall you'll hit eventually. Whoopsie, the merge went wrong. Whoopsie, didn't mean to check that in. Whoopsie,... Most version control systems will allow you to crash through that wall with a little damage, might slow you down a little, but you'll keep going.

git's wall is thick, made of brick and reinforced concrete, and you'll be heading toward it at 200kph. You'll get going again eventually, once the metaphoric car gets glued back together.

Non-metaphorically, my experience has been that with SVN, Mercurial, et. al., a few quick web searches and I'm on my way. With git, "wait a minute...run that by me again?" I've used git for going on a decade, and now that I'm in an SVN shop I do sorely miss it. But, man, it's got some sharp edges.

This is a good metaphorical version of what it's like introducing new people to Git: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=92wPOsuHZ9Y

I've never had to manually edit merge history in Git like SVN forces when merging complicated branch hierarchies. SVN is basically a half implemented VCS where the guts are exposed and you tread lightly whenever doing anything the original design didn't anticipate like ubiquitous merging.

GitHub really does nothing to make day-to-day usage of Git easy–it doesn't solve merge conflicts. It doesn't allow you to rebase commits. It doesn't find commits that you inadvertently wrote out of the branch. What it really does is provide a nice GUI around the current state of the repository and add some collaborative tools.

The big help for me at the time was the ease to navigate files accross merges, branches, commits, and share a specific point to anyone through a simple URL.

Up until this day navigating code feels more natural on the site that on native apps like sourcetree. I really miss the ease to see the same file from two different branches or commits, the feature might be there in native apps but I just couldn’t find it.

No, the shiny and efficient tool for daily git work is called magit, it runs on the Emacs platform (which also features a rather nice text editor).

> (which also features a rather nice text editor).

I know, right? This 'evil' thing is going places.

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