[tmhedberg]

Why do I get prompted to enter a commit message when I'm just doing a git pull?

Because `git pull` == `git fetch` + `git merge`. If there are upstream commits you are fetching that are not ancestors of your head commit, then pulling involves merging the divergent history, thus creating a new merge commit. And a merge commit, like any commit, needs a message.

Why do I have to explicitly add every file I want to commit each time?

Because Git has an intermediate staging area (the "index") between your working directory and the committed history. This is a great feature; one of the most useful aspects of Git, in fact. The side effect is that you must add your changes to the index before committing, but this is a small price to pay for the huge increase in flexibility the index affords.

Why can't it just default to "everything under the current dir" like svn does?

You can do `git add .` to add everything in the current directory without naming it all explicitly. Or you can use the `git commit -a` shortcut (and similar -A and -u options) to add and commit in a single command. This is hardly a significant increase in effort over `svn commit`.