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Comment by shaky | Hacker News Reader

I don't understand the appeal of using a cli to manage commits, branches, remotes, merges with conflicts, and so on. To me all these things are so much better internalized and understood when presented visually. Git GUIs are aplenty (Sublime Merge being my latest discovery, SourceTree before that) and generally really good. Combined with the already amazing GitHub web GUI, it's a wonder what use case is better served by sticking to the cli, other than this misplaced notion that it's what the cool kids are doing.

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How about when you already do most of your development on the command line? In web development anyway, most frameworks, servers and tools are CLI only so you are already on the command line for the most part. It's far quicker to do a quick commit there and then rather then move to a GUI.

That said, I use both. Most of my commits etc. are on the CLI but I still switch to a GUI if I want to browse the repo or see more detailed diffs etc.

Exactly this. I use the GitHub CLI and website interchangably throughout the day. When making commit messages, I generally always link a commit to an issue. So the end of a commit message will generally say "Resolves #281" or "Fixes #433" or "See Issue #218" or whatever.

I usually need to double check open issues when making these messages and since I am already writing commits on the command line, having a split terminal or tab that can pull up active commits with a single line command and see them in a concise and clean format, it is super helpful and fast.

If you are already working in the command line all day long, then it makes perfect sense to have access to GitHub in the command line as well.

Another benefit is that most IDEs will have direct terminal access within the IDE, which means you can get relevant GitHub details about your project from within the IDE via the terminal, without needing to leave the IDE.

Lastly, the CLI version is far more concise and simple compared to the web version.

I am not hating the web version. I still use the web version plenty. But it is just another useful tool in the quiver that has plenty of use cases and simplifies workflow.

It's worth installing the CLI just for a single command:

`gh pr create --web`

Saves me having to push my current branch, navigate to the repo page, hit the "create PR" button, etc.

These days when I push a branch, github gives a URL in the response that I can click from the terminal to open a PR. It is indeed very good.

That is pretty nice.

I've been doing `git push -u origin HEAD` and then using my mouse to click on the "go here to create a PR" link that gets printed, which isn't too bad. Takes you right to the page where you can review the changeset before opening the PR. If I'm not actually ready to open a PR by the time I push upstream, I just open a draft instead.

Yes, that's what I do as well. I also have the old hub frontend for git installed. The idea is that you simply alias git to hub and then you get a few extra commands.

My favorite is "git browse", which opens a browser for the current repo & branch. There are a few other commands that are probably useful but that I don't really do much with.

This is one of my favourites, too! And combined with the alias functionality, you can do

    gh alias set pcw 'pr create --web'

and then just use

    gh pcw

to create a new PR. There's also sufficient smarts around forking or not, depending on write permissions on the upstream repo.

Do you run this command frequently enough to do an alias? I feel like it'd be better to just have the muscle memory of typing the actual command instead

Probably a few times a day? One nice thing about the alias is that it expands and takes more parameters if you want, like

    gh pcw --base=development

It's also super quick to set up an alias, so I don't see why not.

I used to have a lot of git aliases but then I became dependent on those and forgot the actual git commands that were lying underneath. So whenever I went to a new system I'd have to port my dotfiles or look up the git docs for what the commands were. If a colleague asked me "how do I do X" I had no clue and had to look in my bashrc. Nowadays I only add them if I do it many many times per day. Like "git commit -a -m" for example. I try to keep things as close to stock as I can

This type of alias seems on the fence for me, if was like 10x a day I'd definitely be on board but a few times a day is a gray area

Yeah this is huge— I used to use `hub` for this one thing as well. The alternative is even worse if you cloned from a repo you don't have push access to, so your first step is going to the web UI, creating the fork, switching the remote on your clone, and then _finally_ pushing and creating the PR.

Thanks for this, will start using it.

This is the main reason I'm installing - I can build this into my editor pretty easily.

Official CLI tools make it much easier to build automation with shell scripts.

One example that comes to mind - we used hub to hack together a quick security feature that errors out our CI/CD pipeline (which runs shell scripts) if there are any open PRs that are labeled "security" (i.e. Dependabot opening a PR to update a vulnerable library), which forces developers to keep their dependencies up-to-date in order to deploy into production.

GUI tools don't work as part of CI/CD pipelines.

Libraries in higher-level languages (e.g. Python) force you to make sure that there's a library for every tool that you work with - if a specific tool is missing a Python library, then you have to deal with that yourself. Shell scripting is much more productive for gluing multiple sets of tooling together, as long as the shell scripts remain of a maintainable length.

There are a bunch of examples which I find very useful with the CLI: Creating new repos (gh repo create), opening the repo in the browser (gh repo view), checking out PRs when you have the ID (gh pr checkout ID), diffing the currently checkout PR against the base (gh pr diff).

It has nothing to do with being a cool kid. No two people are the same. How you best process information may not be how someone else best processes information. Neither is right or wrong they are just different Everyone deserves to have tools available which fit how their brain best processes information.

If you are not on Linux, please try Fork. It's plenty fast and very robust, I have fallen in love with it on first sight.

Better scripting / automation maybe? I don't have any specific example in mind right now, but being able to pipe things together with other utilities could make for interesting applications, and is easier than having to interact with a REST API.

Yeah, CI solutions can use this command instead of having to write and maintain their own github API interfacing, for example.

I have an open source project that moved from using Jira to track issues and changes to Github. Before, when the project made a release, it would fetch info from Jira to create a changelog.

With this tool, I was able to do something similar using Github as the source of information instead[1].

I fetch the info using the gh tool, output the result into json, and use a python script to format the output which results in a decent looking automatically generated changelog[2].

It's not the most exciting thing, and I could have probably achieved it in a different way using the GraphQL API directly, but for the needs of the project this fit the bill and let me get on with the release.

[1] https://github.com/aurora-scheduler/aurora/blob/master/build...

[2] https://github.com/aurora-scheduler/aurora/blob/master/CHANG...

Indeed, a project I work on has a release script which tags a release and all and currently uses a third party tool for the GitHub interactions. Now we can use the first party GitHub CLI commands instead.

The things you mentioned are better when presented visually. Visual representations leverage the visual processing system of the human brain, and for graph-like data are near-objectively superior to linear textual representations.

However, you can approximate visual representations of these things in a CLI - `git log --graph --pretty=oneline --decorate --abbrev-commit` will use ASCII characters to draw the DAG of commits.

Moreover, the GitHub web GUI is not "amazing". It's tolerable as far as web UIs go, but it's missing a lot of keyboard shortcuts (and none of them are customizable), has no built-in extensibility (the fact that you can inject your own scripts and stylesheets is a hack only at the display level, and an impractical one at that), EDIT: isn't scriptable, and is incredibly resource-intensive relative to a native application. The GitHub CLI allows you to manage the non-git parts of GitHub from the command-line (and make your own GitHub native client by extension) - which is desirable, given the above.

gitk comes with Git - it's not perfect but it beats ascii art.

I don't think the GH web interface is even tolerable. Even Bitbucket, which really sucks, has a better one...

Without a CLI you can't automate. (I guess you could, but it will be a pain in the ass)

There was the option to use curl and the GitHub API, but the CLI wraps that very conveniently in the "api" subcommand.

Huh? Github actions have been around for over a year, and Github webhooks since I can't remember when.

Not really sure what you're talking about. Not everything you automate on GitHub happens in the context of a CI pipeline like in GitHub Actions. There are many cases for small scripts where you just need to execute a couple of commands.

Yeah, and this is the correct way to automate anything relating to github. Their API is insane.

...unless you use their CLI wrapper over the API (as in this post) :)

I've never felt the need to visualize git scenarios; they just aren't all that complicated most of the time, though I can see how it might be useful to open a graph viewer if you have a tricky merge to sort out.

For me, being able to just note down in a text file an exact trace of what I've done is the gist of why CLIs are superior for my use. How do you even begin to keep track of what you do in a GUI? You could record video, but the information density is way too low for it to be useful, and it's worthless for automation.

A lot of my stuff gets automated by me first doing stuff manually, recording what I do in a script, and next time just running said script. That's just flat out not possible with most GUI tools, and even if it were, it's too cumbersome to be worth doing.

Git GUIs simply don't provide the power/flexibility the CLI provides without introducing a UI with a gazillion options. I've tried many (GitKraken, Tower (paid for it too!), SourceTree, VS's integration) and I've always gone back to the CLI.

Depends on how well-designed the app is. GitUp has been my go-to for years, after trying almost every other app out there. It offers a bunch of powerful features exposed mostly through right-click menus and single-button shortcuts. The only reason I ever go to the command line (and I used to be a religious command-line-only Git guy) is because GitUp freezes on extremely large diffs, which one of my projects has a lot of.

GUIs are discoverability nightmares though, as you describe. CLIs are the only place you can do a “man git | grep thing”. On macOS there’s ⌘ + ?, but that has never covered all the content in a man entry for the related CLI, IME.

> better... understood when presented visually

Often true for me as well. I like `tig`.

> What use case is better served by sticking to the cli?

Good question. Knowing the "why" of things is important. My answers:

1. Focus - Opening a browser and clicking around takes more patience. It tempts me to go update my company's internal documentation about something irrelevant to my current task.

A CLI lets you pipe things to grep which lets you focus on specific information you care about.

2. Memory - I can write aliases to help me remember my common workflows.

3. Automation - I can have a script check PRs for me. This reduces context switching and enables greater focus and productivity.

Speed and overhead are both areas that should get a lot more focus nowadays; the Github desktop app along with a ton of other applications are Electron / webapps, each one adding a number of always-active processes, complex and expensive rendering, script execution, and a ton of memory usage, which do add up over time. I mean a lot of developers will have two or three Electron apps open right now; Slack and / or Discord, VS Code, Notion, and a bunch more in their browser of choice.

1. Can be addressed by using a GUI which is not on the internet, for example SourceTree, the git interface in IntelliJ, probably many more.

2. Is often unimportant if the GUI tool can make common workflows one or two clicks.

3. Having the CLI tools to automate stuff is great, but is not necessarily the best way to have an interactive session with a repository.

Some of the things I like about graphical interfaces for Git:

- The information density is usually (depending on the program) great - I can see local branches, remote branches, commits and tree diagram for the selected branch, all in less space than a terminal usually takes up.

- A bunch of actions are available by right-clicking on a relevant item, so I don’t have to remember commands and command-line flags etc and I can just get on with things.

- Some actions like “show me the diff between these two commits” are SO much easier that they become a viable way of working.

a CLI is scriptable and automateable, so there's that at least. How about "find all related issues and close based on the commit message and push to production if it's an urgent fix" etc

I have to agree. I used the CLI for years until a coworker showed me Githubs desktop app. I was hesitant at first, but it makes managing multiple projects so much easier.

It's more about automation than about end-user (developer) UI. CLI gives you a simple way to automate tooling for your team's processes (simpler than writing code to call into REST API's), and it's code, so you can maintain it as code and not some set of configurations on a UI somewhere.

Probably because the GUIs are always missing something.

today I wanted to see the commit history and changes of a single file. I tried for 20 minutes to figure how to do that in sublime merge some of that searching online. Failed. Used the command line like I probably should have in the first place.

Besides the obvious advantages of command line user interfaces for a lot of use cases, I am not aware of any really good Git GUI. Can you name any for Linux or Mac OS? Commercial would be ok, as long as it can be installed locally and does not require a server.

I use GitKraken, it is great!

https://www.gitkraken.com/

That to my knowledge is server-based.

It does not require a server to run.

Thanks, then I will give it a try, when I had looked on the web page the last time I got the impression it was a server based application and required an account on their servers.

Thanks to the one downvoting me - what in my comment justifies a downvote? If my statement is wrong, I would certainly be interested in a correction.

Synvento's SmartGit (commercial)[1] is excellent and fully-featured; uses a license file for registering so I don't believe it requires a server.

[1] https://www.syntevo.com/smartgit/

We actually licensed SmartSVN, which was a life saver for its version tree display. For most operations, we tended to use the command line nevertheless.

SourceTree is very good and free. I use it for:

1. Selecting specific lines for a commit. 2. Stashes management 3. Rebasing branches, cherry picking commits.

It is possible to do a lot more with it, but for the most other operations I use command line or GitHub UI.

On Linux I like using gitg. I think it is "good" in the sence that for the tasks it can do (mostly viewing history) the UI is well though out and simple to use. However, it can't do more advanced tasks so it might not be what you are asking for.

I am using it too for visualizing the history, but the version I use doesn't do pushes yet.

vscode with ‘git graph’ extension is the best git toolset ever.

My favorite feature is ctrl+click 2 nodes in the git tree and immediately see file level diff which I can explore in vscode’s diff viewer.

For work, we use git flow with github PR (which I do on github website) and always work in feature branches. I am able to navigate git like a pro, cherry picking etc as needed without a problem. It even works well with git submodules.

If something goes unexpected, git graph is the best tool to figure out what happened and to be able to repair it.

Also, vscode handles merge conflicts in a way I can actually understand and correct without it slowing me down.

I like GitHub desktop

I largely use the CLI and I still manage conflicts and diffs visually (in plain git), by triggering a visual diff application from the CLI when I prefer doing so.

The GIT cli has the option to use an external diff helper if you prefer.

Scripting and shortcuts are very useful. To each their own but doing repetitive tasks in a GUI is prone to errors and boredom

What's amazing about the Github web GUI?

It's not utter garbage (at least not yet).

I'm not sure this is the case! In fact, I strongly suspect that its inability to display logs or diffs correctly has contributed to the widespread developer confusion with respect to Git, especially since there are many people out there who think, implicitly if not explicitly, that Git and Github are one and the same.

You know how a lot of people think merge commits (an important keystone in how easy Git makes it to read and write meaningful history) are inherently "confusing" or "messy", and try to avoid creating them? Well, if you look at them in Github's awful log interface, they sort of are! This doesn't seem like the fault of those developers, and it's not Git's fault, since it ships with powerful command-line and GUI tools for making sense of things.

cli should be the basis of everything.

There can be UI and sometime that's helpful, but all action contained therein will be available on cli, just because that's exactly what the UI calls.

VS Code does everything Sublime Merge does, for free

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