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Comment by Espressosaurus | Hacker News Reader

Things aren't any better. I've given up on the Git command line. I'm never going to remember the various flags-vs-unintuitively-named commands.

TortoiseGit is ugly and sucks, but the only time I've had to drop to the command line is when I need to look for the intersection or disjoint commits

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Let's not trash TortoiseGit. Sven has put so much work and polish into it. Ugly? Maybe you just hate Win32 UIs? That's ok.

TortoiseGit has many great features, including ways to compare anything you can think of.

So far it's been the best free Git client I've used, but I miss TortoiseHg's interface.

I'm still not over Mercurial losing the DVCS wars.

Git has a reputation for having one of the most confusing CLIs ever. However, it's probably better to decide what operations you want to do and work from there to find out the commands needed. That obviates the need to learn so many commands and switches - for me, at least. My training material was also designed like that. My students use them like cheat-sheets until they get familiar enough.

The thing is, I want to design and write code. I don't want to remember a bunch of command line parameters for other stuff.

With Mercurial I didn't have to, it just flowed.

I know the operation I want to perform. I even know approximately what it's called. I can't be bothered to remember what obtuse syntax is required to invoke it.

Rebasing isn't difficult, merging isn't difficult. Staging is stupid so I ignore it. The stash is stupid, so I ignore it (why not just make a new branch and commit?). Bisecting isn't difficult.

Seriously, the concepts are not rocket science. Git just makes it hard to remember how to correctly invoke the thing you want to do for no good reason other than that it was hacked together in a fit of pique and those decisions have stayed with us ever since.

And a lot of the functionality is centered around an email-based workflow, which makes sense for the Linux kernel, and doesn't make sense for anybody else.

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