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Comment by tester756 | Hacker News Reader

>I understand that people might want to make it easier, since the UI is complex, but that’s never going to work. If you abstract away the complexity of the UI, you will necessarily abstract away the power.

I disagree, really.

There is not fundamental reason why you cannot have user-friendly UI for 98% of the cases and some "advanced" for those 2%.

Just like GUIs have "advanced" settings, the CLI can have well designed 10 commands for basic usage that are taught to newbies and then advanced ones.

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The problem is that for 99.99% of the people engaged in the debate over if git is good or not and should be replaced the correct answer for them is "stop fighting it and just learn git" because there's nothing better. They need to stop thinking about how git sucks because that is literally getting in the way of their career goals and is self-sabotage.

And if anyone seriously wants to try to replace git they need to understand how git works first at the level of an advanced expert first anyway. At that point, you can have the discussion about how to make git, with better LFS/monorepo support, with a more pleasant UI/UX, etc.

1. That‘s called stockholm syndrome.

2. Literally no relevant career goal is significantly obstructed by less git proficiency.

What? Maybe I'm misunderstanding you, but are you saying that absense of git knowledge is not a factor for career possibilities? I guess it depends on the kind of job..

Isn't this the case with git? If you only do basic stuff I think you don't need more than 10 commands. And if you wanna go more advanced, you have the other commands and flags. Git has also added some new commands like `switch` to make it easier for newbs.

Do it then. Many have tried. All have failed. Talk is cheap.

>Do it then. Many have tried. All have failed. Talk is cheap.

I'm, just like many other people using GitHub Desktop (or Git Kraken or Git Extension, but I dont like this one)

when I'm working in GUI environment, that's proof that it is possible.

The problem with creating 3rd party tool that's CLI wrapper is that you cannot rely on it being installed on the system.

That's why such solutions usually fail - because you risk relying on stuff that may not get traction and you'd be better sticking to "official" syntax in long run.

Is gitk still a thing that's available with git? Not as full featured but great for viewing and good with many commits/files.

Yes

I'll share here my positive opinion of GitExtensions (on Windows). It has really helped me use and better understand Git, while also helping me define and share workflows with my colleagues..

Other GUIs, like the ones embedded in VisualStudio, VSCode or Rider, try to sell skipping some cognitive steps for some operations as simplifying or speeding up dev flow. I find they are just offering extra (beyond what git itself offers) ways of shooting yourself in the foot.

Magit is great. So not all have failed.

I would say that Mercurial has a simpler UX than Git without being less powerful. I think Jujutsu (see other posts here), which I started, also has simpler UX and is more powerful than Git in many ways. Have you looked at either of those?

About a decade ago, I tried both mercurial and git, and at the time had only subversion knowledge. I remember finding mercurial extremely confusing and git very simple, but don't remember the details about why mercurial was confusing.

Whereas conversely I was glad that with Mercurial I no longer had to deal with Git's staging area (for me, Mercurial's interactive commit serves the same purpose).

Plenty of folks are!

But your talk "it's impossible, trust me" is cheaper since it's a much stronger claim

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