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Comment by CountSessine | Hacker News Reader

The git plumbing and plumbing commands are straightforward and easy enough to understand once you read about them a bit (I recommend the free Pro Git book online).

The original git porcelain commands - git branch, git reset, git pull - are execrable. They’re filled with implementation details (index/cache vs staging), weird and suggestive syntax that seems like it should be extensible and widely applicable but isn’t (localbranch:remotebranch), and nuclear-powered self-destruct functionality hidden amongst playthings (git reset vs git reset —hard).

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It sounds like git in general isn't necessarily the problem (at least after getting the basic model down), it's specifically the interface and associated foot-guns it sticks in there for beginners (and tired experts) to trip over.

Most people most of the time will get by if they grab a decent git GUI, figure out the minimal set of operations they need, and just Google the rest when necessary.

My stupidest git mistake was when I was cleaning out a directory of bin and obj folders and included gits obj folder as well. And of course after crying in the corner for a bit I take a little time to look into git commands and I could have just run 'git clean'

Two additional bad defaults: crlf handling on Windows, and pull not defaulting to rebase.

The message "up to date with origin/master" is also misleading, because it doesn't check the remote itself.

Pull defaulting to rebase could be a dangerous and chaotic default. If you want to argue that pulling should be fast-forward-only, then I'd say maybe you have a case.

I have aliases ff for fast-forward-only merges and puff for fast-forward-only pulls. I never type `git pull` anymore, and it's much harder to shoot your foot off with the aliases.

`git checkout` great for switching to a different commit and for throwing away local unstaged changes!

Using `git checkout` with a filename really really really should have a yes/no prompt by default, or at least an `-i` option like `rm`.

I think `git switch` is an attempt to resolve this

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