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Comment by flockonus | Hacker News Reader

I legit ask myself how many folks avoid Github Desktop for some dogmatic reasoning equivalent to "having an UI makes it worse", when it does the core of common flows extremely easily and clear.

To be clear where it ties to this post: it makes git far more convenient with nearly 0 learning curve.

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When I was first learning coding, git, etc. and had no clue how git worked I downloaded GitHub desktop and used that. It's true that I was much younger and less knowledgeable then so it's possible that's influencing me but man when you actually understand git the cli just feels so much smoother, cleaner, and faster. It really doesn't take much dedicated to time to learn the top 5 commands you'll use 95% of the time and if you don't know git currently I think it's probably one of the most leveraged ways you can spend your time.

My thought is, if a GUI like GH Desktop makes it hard to use Git, then your workflow is too complicated. Version control doesn't have to be complicated. But a lot of that is upstream decisions about how you structure your work as a team.

Judging by the name, Github Desktop works only with github... ?

I'm not sure if there's advanced commands that GitHub Desktop does more with but for the most part it's just a porcelain frontend that works great for doing simple operations but can't do things like interactive rebases, reflogs, blames and so on. It's a pretty simple frontend to get started if you're just learning git. There's not much it does that's GitHub specific. If you're logged in, it will easily checkout your upstream repos.

Can't be leet like that!

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