git's data model is incredibly powerful and flexible, but its UX is famously... interesting:
Especially because the text is actually written by a human, and it's clear from every sentence
I miss the extensibility of Windows, back when programs still fought for the users (Tron reference). Shell extensions, COM/OLE, ActiveX controls. Sure they were annoying but they actually did stuff that we just can't do any more. Even start menu folders with more than one entry. It was like each thing you installed could be a plugin for your whole computer, not just an isolated space where you visit sometimes (the iOS model).
no idea where I saw that though and it was many many years ago.
There are, at this point, quite a few git-successors that either basically or literally use gits object model - git-butler, jujutsu, sapling (iirc). It's at worst good-enough.
git -h branch
git branch --help
I see that `git -h branch`, `git branch --help` and `git --help branch` give the long output but `git branch -h` gives the short. I suspect that `git [-h | --help] branch` is converted to `git help branch` which runs `help` with argument `branch`. But `git branch -h` runs `branch` with argument `-h`. Also as `git -h alias` prints the alias definition while `git alias -h` gives the short help for the aliased command.
The only downside to this is that it is hard for me to help people with git problems since I can only tell them what conceptually has to be done, not how to accomplish it using the CLI.
If you're trying to teach a child how filesystems work, do you open a terminal and teach them `ls` and `cd`? No of course not. You use some kind of GUI file manager with a tree view.
I disagree. "What's happening behind the scenes" is not the corresponding CLI command - it's the actual modification to the commit graph, and GUIs are much better at exposing what is happening. Think about something like a rebase. Find any article explaining Git rebase. It will have diagrams showing what happens to the commits and those diagrams are exactly what a Git GUI displays!
To follow my filesystem analogy, when you move a file, the thing that's happening behind the scenes is that the file is moved, not `mv A B`.
> make it harder to recover from mistakes.
Also disagree. I'm not sure what you're talking about exactly but assuming reflog, then most GUIs don't support that and you're going to have to use the CLI in either case. But "GUIs don't cover this rare feature" isn't a reason to ditch them completely.
I agree there are a lot of awful GUIs though. It doesn't help that the Git website lists dozens of them and only 2 or 3 are any good. My recommendation: if you use VSCode, the Git Graph extension. If you want a standalone tools, SourceGit or maybe GitX if you're on Mac.