[jarin]

If you're a developer: Git is faster to work with and more powerful to use from the command line if you take maybe 20 minutes to go through a good tutorial. It took you much longer to learn how to program, and it's worth taking the time to get good at it.

If you're a designer, writer, etc: Even though it only takes 20 minutes to learn, if a GUI is what it takes to get you to use version control I guess that is the lesser of two evils :)

[Maro]

That's not true. You can't learn git in 20 minutes or 2 hours, unless you equate learning git to learning to type simple commands like 'git pull' and related. But then you're not really learning git, you're just typing generic VCS commands.

[eru]

You can read about the basic architecture and concepts of git in 2 hours. It's not that complicated.

You may need more than those 2 hours to really digest and understand everything, and see how it plays out in practise. But after the first 2 hours you should be ready to use git. (Actually you should be using git, because how else are you going to learn?)

[aantix]

I love the cheat gem.

sudo gem install cheat

Then do :

cheat git

A great shortcut to all of the common git command sequences.

[mickeyben]

sweet didn't know about it, it's very handy with my little Mac OS X alias to open preview from command line :

alias preview='groff -Tps > /tmp/tmp.ps && open -a Preview /tmp/tmp.ps'

So you can do :

cheat git | preview

[aantix]

Nice, very cool alias. Thank-you!

P.S. As an added note, there are TONS of cheat sheets out there. Just do a 'cheat sheets' from the command line and you'll get the all listed. Some of the more common ones I would suspect in the HN community are :

cheat svn

cheat rails

cheat named_scope

cheat curl

cheat blueprint

cheat bash

cheat mysql

cheat ruby

[kalid]

Awesome, thanks for sharing that alias.

[hboon]

And an excellent read to learn about Git is http://tom.preston-werner.com/2009/05/19/the-git-parable.htm..., from a GitHub cofounder.