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Comment by moe | Hacker News Reader

Nothing against gitbox but I find it a bit of a tragedy that they can advertise with making submodules bearable in first place.

This stuff really needs an overhaul in core-git. The CLI experience is indeed so terrible that most people avoid submodules altogether.

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My personal problem with git was inherent inefficiency of CLI. E.g. I was typing "gs" to see the status almost after every little command. In Gitbox you just see the status. Similar thing with submodules: you need to get in and out, verify the status of a submodule and its parent. In Gitbox you just see the whole picture and click a single button to do something useful.

My question is not to git CLI guys (they are doing great job, by the way), but to others like Tower and SourceTree: why in the world they complicate things so much? If one needs a very flexible/configurable environment, git CLI is just fine.

To me the CLI is about fine. It's just the submodules that are poorly executed and break all sorts of expectations.

The mini-primer on submodule-WTFs: "must be executed in root-directory", no auto-clone/update of submodules, incomplete info about submodules in status-commands, manual maintenance of .gitmodules, a wide range of irritating/misleading failure modes and error messages...

It's really no surprise you hardly ever see a submodule on e.g. github, even on projects where it would make sense. The maintenance headache usually dwarves all potential benefits.

I've tried both and much prefer SourceTree.

It's a fantastic piece of software and find all the options intuitive and nicely executed.

I just wish they would merge in apenwarr's git-subtree. It's so much better than submodules for most use cases.

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