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Comment by taink | Hacker News Reader

I haven't used Gitless before but usually these types of abstractions fall short for me. It never helped me as much as truly learning git.

I learned so much about the commands that intimidated me by playing "Oh My Git!"[1]. It's an open source game that presents commands as quick-to-understand concepts and lets you experiment with them by using playing cards on the visual rendition of a repository. I was honestly surprised nobody else mentioned it here, maybe it's not that well known.

Of course it's not completely accurate all the time in its descriptions but it sure helps understanding the underlying workings a bit more, and it pushed me into actually reading the manual.

[1] https://ohmygit.org/

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I have "truly learned git" (including having written a clone for a school project) and still hate the CLI and conventional Git workflow. Why is checkout overloaded to mean "restore a file from the index" or "move to a different branch" or "move to a different commit?" Why can reset mean both "un-add a file" or "delete a commit?"

I am very happy that there are better frontends for git like Gitless or Facebook's Sapling. I also think their commands are more of a 1:1 mapping to "raw" git operations behind the scenes.

To be fair even if those commands are still overloaded there are new commands that aren’t overloaded. (git restore for example now has its own command).

"git checkout" is a deprecated command, use "git switch" to switch to a commit, and "git restore" to restore a file

Tell that to Google and all the top results for switching to a commit which everyone usually phrases as "git howto checkout commit"

As of the current git release (v2.41.0), there is nothing in the documentation for "checkout" indicating it is deprecated, while the documentation for "switch" contains the phrase -- in all caps, like this -- "THIS COMMAND IS EXPERIMENTAL. THE BEHAVIOR MAY CHANGE."

One presumes checkout will eventually be deprecated by switch, but it isn't yet.

I guess that warning is to prevent people from using it on a script because it’s not a stable command. But for normal shell usage, it’s the preferred method.

Preferred how? I get a warning when I use checkout? Who is teaching me it's preferred? Am I expected to keep up with a community newsletter to use my version control tools?

Preferred by whom?

Where is one supposed to learn this sort of thing? If the cli doesn't tell you when you use it, there's no way a lot of people will discover this.

All good critique. Not sure whether it's better to overload a command or force users to remember multiple ones...

I used Mercurial 12 years ago before learning Git - it was a great stepping stone. I loved `hg` CLI as things made sense for the workflow.

This sounds like a great tool, but I'm not sure anything could push me to read the Git documentation. It's written by someone too brilliant for me. I prefer to find a Stack Overflow answer where someone has dumbed it down a bit.

The Git docs are horrible, but that's not because the author is smarter than you. It's because the author is a lousy communicator.

I mean, I’m a lousy communicator, I can’t exactly blame them.

But I still don’t want to read their documentation.

Another fun learning resource: https://learngitbranching.js.org/

Oh My Git! looks really cool and useful, thanks for mentioning it! I find it incredible that it's funded by the Prototype Fund (https://prototypefund.de/project/oh-my-git/), and it makes me wonder which other countries have similar funds hackers can apply to.

I'm curious as to why the windows version is 8x the file size of the mac/ linux ones

Maybe it contains a segment about installing git on Windows.

It's likely that they need to include the full std library in the windows version (build with something other than microsoft's c++ compiler, like msys g++ or similar)

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