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Comment by tylerhou | Hacker News Reader

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.

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"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.

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).

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.

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