Comment by RHSeeger | Hacker News Reader

Comment by RHSeeger | Hacker News Reader

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The problem I've seen is that there's two groups of people that are generally involved in a conversation like this

1. The group of people that think git is powerful, but the CLI makes it difficult to do anything that is even slightly outside the box (which, for example, makes fixing a mistake difficult).

2. The group of people that think git is powerful, and the CLI is easy to use, and refuse to acknowledge that it's difficult for some people; rather, they blame the people for being wrong.

I've been using git for 10+ years and I fall into the second group. Every time I get into a situation the isn't the normal workflow, I have to google how to fix it. And I need to check and double check what I'm doing because, if I do it wrong, I need to reclone the entire repo to undo my mistake (and heaven forbid I'm trying to correct something on the origin). I get it, my git skills are not good enough... but by this point they _should_ be, just by using the tool. The fact that they aren't says something bad about the tool.

And that being said, the people in the second group will still say that git is fine, and it must be a problem with me. Admittedly, I'm not perfect, but neither am I incompetent. It shouldn't require a decade plus (and lots of dedicate study) of use to become proficient with a tool.

What about the third group who don't want to touch a cli? Who want to push a button on a gui and call it a day.

I actually meant to include a note at the end...

- There's no group I've seen of that say git isn't powerful

- The group that doesn't want to use a CLI at all doesn't generally participate in this conversation (about the CLI), because they'd rather see a visual tool build on top of it that. (I know a lot of people in this group; I'm not, but I respect where they're coming from)

I’m in the third group.

I fall into the first and third groups outlined. I love Git, but if the project I’m working on is in VS Code, I just use that because it’s less friction than breaking into a CLI workflow. I also use VS Code to resolve more complex things because I find the Git CLI to be unintuitive.

Eh, what about group 3?

3 The group of people that think that git is powerful, and that CLI is not the best but still learnable, and that acknowledge that for some inexplicable reasons some people cannot seem to learn git somehow.

I think the problem is that the scope simply grew. Back in my svn days, "merge branch" is something only senior engineer does for entire team and not every day; patches are exchanged by emailing entire files or .patch files; rebase is imposible; you "stash" with "cp file file.old"; and history rewrite is something that happens once or twice in your carrer.

And with git, you are basically expected to do all of that, every day, even if you a just starting.

To address only one sentence of your comment and offer a pointer for anyone who needs it: the git reflog can get one out of some uh-oh-reclone-time mistakes and it's pretty easy to use.

I appreciate the comment, but "it's pretty easy to use" is not something I've found to be true when it comes to reflog.

To be fair, the CLI is pretty easy to use, and if you get into a situation where you need to redo your entire repo, that's entirely on you. In the 16 years I've been using Git I have never had an issue that wasn't solved by carefully reading the documentation (something that is lost on developers, these days).

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