[stingraycharles]

I don’t understand how people can remember all these custom scripting languages. I can’t even remember most git flags, I’m ecstatic when I remember how to iterate over arrays in “jq”, I can’t fathom how people remember these types of syntaxes.

[crispyambulance]

I am convinced that the vast majority of professionals simply don't bother to remember and, ESPECIALLY WITH GIT, just look stuff up every single time the workflow deviates from their daily usage.

At this point perhaps a million person-years have been sacrificed to the semantically incoherent shit UX of git. I have loathed git from the beginning but there's effectively no other choice.

That said, the OP's commands are useful, I am copying them (because obviously I won't ever memorize them).

[freedomben]

> I am convinced that the vast majority of professionals simply don't bother to remember and, ESPECIALLY WITH GIT, just look stuff up every single time the workflow deviates from their daily usage.

I wrote a cheat sheet in my notes of common commands, until they stuck in my head and I haven't needed it now for a decade or more. I also lean heavily on aliases and "self-documenting" things in my .bashrc file. Curious how others handle it. A search every time I need to do something would be too much friction for me to stand.

[dheera]

I just use Claude Code as a terminal for git these days. It writes up better commit messages than I would write anyway. No more "git commit -m fix"

[selcuka]

That could work if Claude Code made the code changes, but if you made them and only asked Claude to commit them, how does it know "why" you made those changes? Does it have access to your bug tracking system, for example?

[dheera]

> but if you made them and only asked Claude to commit them, how does it know "why" you made those changes?

It's an LLM. It can diff and figure out why I did what I did, in most cases

> Does it have access to your bug tracking system, for example?

You can give it access and tell it to look there

[awesome_dude]

If Claude was used in the creation of the change, there's usually some dialogue for Claude to use.

FWIW i use Claude to help with code changes, then give the diff to Gemini to review/ create meaningful commit messages

[yujiachen]

I just wrapped these 5 diagnostic commands into a Claude Code skill. Because the post is useful but I'm not sure I can remember these git commands all the time... https://github.com/yujiachen-y/codebase-recon-skill

[freedomben]

indeed, I held off for a while but finally caved because I got sick of seeing commits with `git commit -m .` littered in there. These are personal projects so I'm the only one dev-ing on them, but still so nice to have commit messages.

[bluGill]

I refuse to have alises and other custom commands. Either it is useful for everyone and so I make a change to the upstream project (I have never done this), or it won't exist next time I change my system so there is no point. I do have some custom tools that I am working on that haven't been released yet, but the long term goal is either delete them or release them to more people who will use them so I know it will be there next time I use a different system.

[irishcoffee]

> I refuse to have alises and other custom commands.

I am the same way, and have caught much flack for it over the years.

But when I sit down at a foreign system (foreign in the sense that I haven't used it before) because something is broken and my help was requested, I don't have any need to lean on aliases.

I worked with someone once that had a very impressive bashrc, and it was very effective for them... on their workstation. Plop them in front of a production system, they can't even remember how to remount / rw because they've been using an alias for so long.

This is also why I learned vi, having started with emacs 30 years ago initially, as it was first taught to me. I know it'll be there, and I know how to use it.

[tcoff91]

You don’t need aliases when you have fzf fuzzy history search with ctrl-r

[freedomben]

it's a tradeoff for sure. With dig especially I can't ever remember the normal syntax because I have aliases and scripts for things. I feel the aliases are wroth it since I'm on my own machine(s) 99.5% of the time, but it does suck to be handicapped

[irishcoffee]

Absolutely, and I think aliases are great and should be used. I, personally, worked in a handful of environments that made me realize it was infeasible to lean on aliases and helper scripts. Like bluGill said, if I need it in a real way, I'll try and upstream it.

What I resent is someone telling me how to use a computer. I've got that bit mostly down at this point.

[alwillis]

> At this point perhaps a million person-years have been sacrificed to the semantically incoherent shit UX of git. I have loathed git from the beginning but there's effectively no other choice.

Yes! We mostly wouldn’t tolerate the complexity and the terrible UX of a tool we use everyday--but there's enough Stockholm Syndrome out there where most of us are willing to tolerate it.

[TeMPOraL]

Unless you're aware that such powerful commands are something you need once in a blue moon, and then you're grateful that the tool is flexible enough to allow them in the first place.

Git may be sharp and unwieldy, but it's also one of the decreasing amount of tools we still use - the trend of turning tools into toys consumed the regular user market and is eating into tech software as well.

[crispyambulance]

Tools, done right, are a joy to use and allow you to be expressive and precise while also saving you labor. Good tools promote mastery and creative inquiry.

Git is NOT that.

Git is something you use to get stuff done, until it becomes an irritating obstacle course of incidental complexity.

[irishcoffee]

Hg is a joy to use compared to git. Sure wish hg had won.

[alwillis]

> Sure wish hg had won.

To me, it's more like GitHub won; Git came along for the ride.

Back in the day when companies evaluated Git and Mercurial (Facebook, Google, Microsoft), they decided Mercurial was better. Mozilla used Mercurial for a long time until switching to Git fairly recently.

But once GitHub took off and became the center of gravity for developers, it became the de facto standard.

It also explains why there have been several attempts (Sapling, JJ) to use Mercurial's semantics as a front-end for Git.

[skydhash]

Why should there be tolerance? You look it up once, then write a script or an alias if it's part of your workflow. Or made a note if it's worth that. I use magit and I get quick action and contextual help at every step of my interaction with git.

[kelvinjps]

That's why I really like lazygit, I don't need to remember much because all the keymaps are shown in the UI. I like those kinds of Ui like whichkeys in neovim, or helix, or Doom Emacs.

[dec0dedab0de]

I just use my ide integrations for git. I absolutely love the way pycharm/jetbrains does it, and I'm starting to be ok with how vscode does. Remembering git commands besides the basics is just pointless. If I need to do something that the gui doesn't handle, I'll look it up and put it in a script.

[shiroiuma]

>I am convinced that the vast majority of professionals simply don't bother to remember and, ESPECIALLY WITH GIT, just look stuff up every single time the workflow deviates from their daily usage

Partly that, but for me at least, I have a bunch of simple bash scripts and aliases for things I do frequently. Git makes this really easy because you can set aliases for lots of custom commands in the .gitconfig file.

[ngruhn]

I don't even think git cli UX is that bad. Didn't git pioneer this sub-command style? Much better than like e.g. ffmpeg. Sure some aspects are confusing. I still don't understand why `checkout` is both for changing branches and clearing uncommitted changes. But overall I think the tool is amazing. I've not observed a bug in git once.

[skydhash]

> I still don't understand why `checkout` is both for changing branches and clearing uncommitted changes.

Because `checkout` is for getting the working directory to the state of a specific revision. Which both means switching branches (which are just pointer to revisions) and clearing changes (and get back to the starting revision). In both cases, you "check out" the version of the file at a specific commit or HEAD.

[jcynix]

> Didn't git pioneer this sub-command style?

No, various other tools used it before git, e.g. openssl.

[ngruhn]

sure but it certainly popularized it

[twohaibei]

`git change` can switch branches too if thats easier to grasp :)

[neonstatic]

I think this is where LLMs shine. I experience the same difficulty with a lot of command line tools, .e.g find is a mystery to me after all these years. Whatever the syntax is, it just doesn't stick in my memory. Since recently I just tell the model what search I want and it gives me the command.

[awesome_dude]

The relevant XKCD comic https://xkcd.com/1597/

FWIW I too was once a "memorised a few commands and that was it" type of dev, then I read 3 chapters of the Git book https://git-scm.com/book/en/v2 (well really two, the first chapter was a "these are things you already know") and wow did my life with git change.

[weedhopper]

I’ve recently been looking into some tools that provide quick or painless help like pop up snippets with descriptions and cheat sheets, got any recommendations?

[arcanemachiner]

Navi is good for generating personal cheatsheets:

https://github.com/denisidoro/navi

But for Git, I can't recommend lazygit enough. It's an incredible piece of software:

https://github.com/jesseduffield/lazygit

[rusted_gear]

I've found tldr to be useful

https://github.com/tldr-pages/tldr

[alwillis]

Cheaters: https://brettterpstra.com/projects/cheaters

[FergusArgyll]

Just handroll one, I wrote one in python, use an sqlite db, call out to fzf and voila you have the perfect tool. Codex can prob one shot it

[Cthulhu_]

I don't, I will google things and fiddle, then put it in a git alias (with a comment on what it does and / or where I got it from) and push it to my private dotfiles repo, taking it with me between computers and projects.

[dewey]

You research it once, use it and then remember that it has "ancestor" in the command somewhere and then use ctrl + R to dig up something from your shell history.

[dzaima]

jj's template and revset languages are very simple syntactically, so once you're comfortable with the few things you do use often it's just a question of learning about the other existing functions (even if only enough to know to look them up), which slot right in and compose well with everything else you know (unlike flags which typically have each their own system).

Or, perhaps better yet, defining your own functions/helpers as you go for things you might care about, which, by virtue of having been named you, are much easier to remember (and still compose nicely).

[jiggunjer]

Really, I got stuck trying to commit all files except those containing the string abc. As for revsets it's not easy to grab a single branch?

[usrbinbash]

> I don’t understand how people can remember all these custom scripting languages.

We can't.

Why do you think the `man` command exists?

[yujiachen]

Same here, so I wrap the post into an agent skill. Hope I can use them next time. https://github.com/yujiachen-y/codebase-recon-skill

[limaoscarjuliet]

Some things are idioms that one repeats so often they just stick, e.g. I use "grep.... | cut -c x-y | sort | uniq -c | sort -nr" to quickly grep frequency of some events from a log file.

Don't feel bad - no one remembers them all, we just remember a few idioms we use...

[mgfist]

Same, but now with AI I don't have to remember that anymore

[awesome_dude]

For now - the law of enshittification means that the free/cheap access to AI will be curtailed soon enough.

[mgfist]

Pretty much any OS locally runnable LLM can generate this stuff.

[gspr]

You and me both. Git is just so prevalent and fundamental to so much these days that I forced myself to use only a cheat sheet lying on my desk until I could comfortably use a reasonably productive subset by memory. Little did I know that that would make my colleagues think I'm some sort of git sage.

But jq I use maybe once a week, and it just won't stick. Same for any git features beyond basic wrangling of the history tree (but, on the flip side, that basic wrangling has eliminated 99% of the times I have to look things up).

[drob518]

Nobody does. One person figures it out, then writes a blog post, and we all Google for it. Even git’s man pages are long and sometimes cryptic.

[robrain]

If I look something up twice, I record it in Obsidian. If I need it more than a couple of times, I'll probably make an alias, a script or a mask [1] file. Autocomplete and autosuggest are essential to my workflow. And good history search.

[1] https://github.com/jacobdeichert/mask

[SoftTalker]

Yeah especially with git. All I know is pull, add, commit, push. Everything else I have to look up.

[TheRealPomax]

If you don't have to codedive new projects all the time, there's zero reason to memorize these. If your job is to look at new codebases all the time, you probably learn to remember these commands pretty quickly.

[Fokamul]

You add them into your GIT config file as shortcuts?

If you have multiple machines (/must have), just apply your user config to current machine?

[TeMPOraL]

People naturally remember what they use frequently. For things they use infrequently, they search on-line and/or read the friendly manual.

And yes, I'm also ecstatic when I manage to iterate over anything in `jq` without giving up and reaching for online reference. For `git`, functionality I use divides neatly into "things I do at least every week or two" and "things that make me reach for the git book every single time".

I mean, that was true until ~year or so. Now, I just have an LLM on speed dial. `howto do xyz in $tool`, `wtf is git --blah`, `oneliner for frobbing the widget`, etc.

[michaelcampbell]

`jq` and `ffmpeg` were two of my very early uses of LLM's for daily ease.

[PapstJL4U]

lazygit helped me to get more into different git commands - I still don't know them by heart. but at least I use more git has to offer.

and when a new branch is one key stroe away from being created, I am more inclined to use it.

[NoSalt]

So, how does one iterate over an array in jq? Asking for a friend.

[wwader]

Assume input is an array you can do it several ways depending on what you want:

    # output each value in the array separately 
    .[]

    # output each value but transform it in some way
    .[] | . * 2


    # map each value into a new array
    map(. * 2) 

    # same as above but manual iterate/collect
    [.[] | . * 2]