Git's CLI is it's greatest weakness. Someone should really just scrap that part and rebuild it from scratch on sane ground.
It’d be interesting to see what a good redesign might look like. I do think some of the command names and command flags could be superficially updated/renamed/moved and provide a meaningful impact on git’s usability and learning curve. I’m curious though about whether the conceptual part of git is the primary source of difficulty, whether git is fundamentally a little hard to learn, because it’s fundamentally a little bit complex. If that’s the case, a rebuild might not help, there might not exist the kind of “sane ground” to build on that you hope for.
These are not toys, one should not expect to just jump into them and start doing work like you would not just jump into a Boeing 747 and just take off, fly and land. It having 100s of buttons is not a weakness.
I think https://github.com/Byron/gitoxide also plans to provide a different CLI, but I don't think they've started working on it.
I bet if you created a great git desktop app with outstanding UI it would still have a few corners 99% of users would never touch or understand.
If that doesn't work you probably have done something really bad to begin with.
... yes? I've used all three of those commands in the past, although I don't remember what they do. and I'm hardly a git expert.
Anyway: “reset” changes the ref to which the HEAD branch points, and depending on options can also update the index and working tree to match as well. “Revert” creates a commit that is the reverse of an earlier commit. Restore rolls back uncommitted changes to a file.
This isn’t hard?
On the other hand, even among the professionals it has a reputation for being tricky and frustrating. Which is not the norm for most critical daily-use tools in this or any professional. So I'd also consider it hard in that sense.
git revert: create a commit that reverses a previous commit
git restore: you got me. I can't remember
Now, I generally do not remember many of the extra arguments that can be passed apart from 'reset --hard/--soft', 'git log --stat/--oneline --decorate', etc.
Personally I've found git complicated when I've worked at a place with bad 'git' discipline. When I've worked at companies with sane branching agreements, etc. I rarely face problems.
- reset: "blindly" load whatever commit you tell it into your working directory. This is the one if you add "--hard" will plow over your working directory in a way that cannot be undone. Actually I think without the "--hard" it won't make any changes to your working directory, it will treat whatever is in said directory as a change from the commit you told it to reset to. Dunno... have to look into it.
- revert: Creates a new commit that undoes whatever commit you pass in. Often times people mistakenly use this to "undo" a merge into a production branch that shouldn't have happened. The result is trouble when they want to push those changes back into production again.
- restore: I have no clue what this does.
Yeah... conceptually Git is kinda easy but the command line is pretty nuts.
Git’s CLI is good as a unix-philosophy low-level tool that user-friendly tools can build on, and is a strength in supporting a wide range of different workflows.
It's suboptimal as a end-user tool for most workflows, but not bad enough for that people consistently build tooling rather than guides for particular workflows.