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Comment by kstenerud | Hacker News Reader

It's a problem of user interface design. Git's user-machine interface does not follow the principle of least astonishment. It's not orthogonal. Functionality is grouped in very strange ways (you list, move, rename and delete branches with branch, but create branches using checkout? Seriously???).

And don't even get me started on the nightmare that is submodules.

The whole thing reminds me of the bad old unix days of "if it was hard to write, it should be hard to understand."

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you list, move, rename and delete branches with branch, but create branches using checkout? Seriously???

  git checkout -b new-branch

... is a shortcut for:

  git branch new-branch
  git checkout new-branch

You can create the branch or otherwise manipulate it without actually checking it out, so it's useful to have it separate and have a shortcut.

(I agree that git's interface is terrible, but I disagree that this is one of those cases. :) )

> but I disagree that this is one of those cases

I do think this is precisely one of those cases.

"Branch" is a major, repo-modifying operation; "checkout" is a trivial context switch operation. The user interface disaster here was that the major operation is treated as subservient to the trivial operation. It should be the other way around.

Therefore, the shortcut for creating a branch and switching to it should be

  git branch -c new-branch

whereby the -c switch checks you into that branch immediately.

branches aren't supposed to be "major". That's the major difference between a system like git and svn. branches are cheap. They are supposed to be used often and even be disposable.

Indeed. "git branch" is a lot like "mkdir". If you accidentally make a branch, deleting it with "git branch -d my-branch" is about as easy as typing "rmdir my-dir".

Nobody would argue that mkdir is a more major operation than cd. Which is my point.

I don't understand how creating a branch is a major operation.

Creating a branch is non-destructive and cheap, tidying up after accidental creation is also easy.

Except, why isn't it "git branch --nocheckout" for the rare cases when you don't want to check out?

Why doesn't "mkdir" cd you into the new subdir unless you type "mkdir --no-cd my-dir"?

Here's why: In 95% of the cases you create a git branch, you check it out. In 95% of the cases you create a directory, you do not cd into it.

For me, it's about 50% for each. I often create a branch just to snapshot the current state of the branch before squashing or rebasing. When I do this, I do not checkout the new branch, and in fact, most likely I will never check it out.

A common mistake people make when bitching about Git, is assuming that their workflow is the only workflow. Git supports a multitude of different workflows, and that fact is both a strength and a weakness.

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