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Comment by VincentEvans | Hacker News Reader

I don’t expect my comment to somehow open the eyes of the writer of this piece, I have almost a resigned feeling posting this, as I have had this same interaction so many times…

I am not a smart man. I’ve been using git for about a decade and I won’t know how to do a checkout using CLI without asking chatgp. But at the same time I have none of the struggles the writer complains about. Because I use a GUI.

And before using git for the first time in 2016 - I used SVN for about a decade, also with a GUI.

The downside is it makes me a lot less cool than Neo-like hackers writing incantations in the dim glow of the monitor. Also if I wanted to write a blog post I would need to think of some other topic.

I use Gitkraken if you are curious, but I know you probably aren’t.

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I use and pay for Git Kraken as well!

I should care more to learn Git fully, but I don’t.

I’m just not interested, but yet it’s a foundational tool to my workflow.

I just want it to work. I don’t want to have to learn commands for a system that I don’t have a love for.

As a reluctant developer I just can’t work with things I don’t like! (Reluctant because I’m too old, was never great, but yet people keep asking for things because apparently everyone else around skis just dreadful at delivering….)

My dislikes are often irrational on the surface, example:

I really do not like Python and 4 space indentation, and find it very hard to work with Django.

But people broadly seem to love Python!

Same with React and JSX. Have people gone mad!

Similarly with VSCode. How do people like this I think to myself?! It’s clunky and slow.

> I use Gitkraken if you are curious, but I know you probably aren’t.

I was, because gitkraken is good. At one point I was forced to use sourcetree, and it was awful. So I don't know if the argument is that guis are good for git so much as this one paid solution is good, and it rubs me the wrong way to think that something like the version control solution used becomes good if you pay for it.

It is good without paying. The interface is awful

I have similar thoughts to yours, except I exclusively use the Git CLI. I don't memorise all of the 'incantations' that the article suggest are required because if I ever use a command a few times, I make a Git alias for it. `git commit --amend --no-edit` => `g cmane`. I also have an alias for listing my aliases, which I can run through grep to jog my memory. That plus Ctrl+R for shell history means I very rarely type long commands. You'd have to be some kind of masochist to do that often.

So IMHO this article and the others that like to dunk on Git CLI seem to miss the point a bit.

Honestly git is too low level for regular day to day actions. I love using jujutsu [0] it makes handling changes and branches really easy and intuitive.

You can rebase a branch and it will actually save commits with conflicts so you can fix them later. You can do undo.

0: https://martinvonz.github.io/jj/v0.10.0/

I learned on the CLI, so I’m a smug terminal user at heart, but now I almost exclusively use the Emacs magit module and I have to admit, it’s really, really nice.

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