[patatino]

I do not want to learn git tricks. I just wanna use it as simple as possible. Just let me push my code and be done with git and keep on working.

Kudos to all who love git, for me, it's just a tool I have to use.

[goku12]

A part of Git's complexity is due to the fact that it was originally meant to be just the plumbing. It was expected that more user-friendly porcelain would be written on top of the git data model. Perhaps that is still the best bet at having a simple and consistent UI. Jujutsu and Got (game of trees) are possible examples.

[bluetomcat]

It's a collection of hacky tools for manipulating a DAG of objects, identified by a SHA-1 hash. If you look at it this way, you wouldn't expect any consistency in the CLI interface.

[dayjaby]

That's a bold statement. Any proof or article where Linus states that?

[iraqmtpizza]

>originally meant to just the plumbing

this describes all of unix. as soon as scripts were allowed to use commands, those commands could never be changed. lest we have a nerd riot on our hands

[Shacklz]

I understand your sentiment but git is really not all that hard. And knowing a few things that go beyond bog-standard checkout/commit/push, especially history-rewriting activities, will greatly improve quality of commit-history - which might not be of much use for you but might help other engineers working on your project to make easier sense of what's going on.

And on another note, git is probably one of the longer-lasting constants in our industry. Technologies develop and change all the time, but for git, it looks like it's here to stay for a while, and it's probably one of the tools we interact with most in day-to-day dev-work. Might be worth having a bit of a look at :)

[mikro2nd]

I'd argue that CVS outlasted git by at least a couple of decades...

[emmelaich]

There is detail inherent in the problem and some not. I tend to think we underestimate the inherent problems.

So I'm happy for the 'complexity' of git.

[beeboobaa]

I do not want to learn programming. I just wanna use the computer as simple as possible. Let me just tell it what to do and be done with it.

Kudos to all who love programming, for me, it's just a tool I have to use.

[Frost1x]

Isn’t that where most interest starts? A computer really is a tool. I know for me, it was an unfortunate discovery at the very start of my interest in computing that to do the things I wanted I had to deal with all these tedious bits of programming.

Even today I’d like to skip most of the underlying tedious bits although I understand knowledge and willingness to deal with much of those underlying tedious bits are what keep money flowing into my account regularly. That’s about the only saving grace of it. There are so many ideas I’d love to explore but the unfortunate fact is there’s a lot of work to develop or even glue together what one needs to test out, not to mention associated infrastructure costs these days. Even useful prototypes take quite an endeavor.

[koonsolo]

My feeling is that the git interface is a leaky abstraction. I also don't want to learn git tricks, but unfortunately I learned more about it than I wanted to.

[foofie]

> do not want to learn git tricks. I just wanna use it as simple as possible.

Simplicity is in the eye of the beholder. A single trick can save you a whole lot of work. Take for example interactive rebate which allows you to update your local branches to merge and reorder local commits. If you had to do everything by hand you would certainly have to work a lot more.

[ourmandave]

Honestly, get outside of commit and pull and my brain feels dread like regular expressions.

Hopefully the incantation is on the Cheat Sheet and I don't make it worse.

[Shacklz]

I had the same experience for a long time and then I took a bit of time to have a deeper look behind the curtain and I have to say, once you grasp the data-model of git itself (a branch is a pointer to a commit, a commit is a pointer with metadata to a tree, a tree is...), many of the commands start to make sense all of a sudden, or at the very least "stop looking dangerous".

As it's one of those rare tools that's probably meant to stay for quite some time and we interact with quite frequently, it was time well spent for me, and it turns out it's really not as hard as the scary-looking commands imply.

[sgarland]

As long as you remember that the reflog exists (and it hasn’t run gc, but usually you immediately know when you’ve messed up), you’ll be fine. It’s exceedingly hard to break your repo beyond repair without trying to do so.

[samatman]

It's unfortunate that the weight of ecosystem and tooling (and the 800 point Microsoft-owned GitHub gorilla) has effectively locked the profession into using git. I don't hate it, I'm just keenly aware that a better approach is possible.

I wish someone with deep pockets would hook the pijul team up with the money and talent they need to make pijul a full-featured alternative with first-class hosting tools. The way it models change is principled and based on solid theory, and I'm convinced that a markedly better tool than git could be built on that foundation.

[globular-toast]

Why even use git then? `scp code server:code` does what you need.

This isn't a rhetorical question.

[TrickardRixx]

Because all the organizations that pay me to write code host their code centrally on GitHub

[herpdyderp]

Totally agree. However, then coworkers who don't understand even the simple git commands mess up their branches (somehow), and... then my git tricks save the day (unfortunately).

[pwb25]

I agree, what more is needed than push and diff and branching, sometimes reset and rebase

[brainzap]

same

[schacon]

I don't totally disagree. I love Git and I find all these things very cool, but I know it's overhead a lot of people don't want. The post is on the blog of the new GUI that I'm trying to build to make the cool things that Git can do much faster and more straightforward, so maybe check it out if the CLI isn't your favorite thing.

[withinboredom]

Beyond a junior engineer, I’d expect an engineer to know more than the basics if they’ve been using git for their entire career so far.

Git is the power saw for software engineers. You don’t want someone who can’t keep all their fingers and toes anywhere near your code.

Not knowing git, when you’ve been interacting with it for years, is a red flag for me. I’m not expecting people to know the difference between rebase and rebase --onto, but they should at least know about the reflog and how to unfuck themselves.