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by ulrikrasmussen 6 days ago
I use git every day and can do quite advanced stuff with it, but I do all of my work using magit in emacs. I don't even use emacs for writing code anymore, I only use it for git. I just can't be bothered with using the CLI, it is too painfully inconsistent.

The only downside to this is that it is hard for me to help people with git problems since I can only tell them what conceptually has to be done, not how to accomplish it using the CLI.
1 comments
IshKebab 6 days ago
When beginners need help with Git and they're using the CLI the first and best advice I give them is to stop using the CLI.
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sigseg1v 5 days ago
This is interesting to me because when beginners come to me for help with git and they're using a GUI, the first thing I do is tell them to ditch it and learn the CLI.
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IshKebab 5 days ago
Hasn't been my experience at all, but also why would you do that? The CLI has an awful confusing UX and also doesn't easily show you the state of things.

If you're trying to teach a child how filesystems work, do you open a terminal and teach them `ls` and `cd`? No of course not. You use some kind of GUI file manager with a tree view.

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ButlerianJihad 5 days ago
It may surprise you to discover that children are quite capable of visualizing filesystem trees without a GUI, and learning `cd` and `ls` may lead them to experiment with `ls -R`, and learning the semantics of '.' and '..'
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IshKebab 5 days ago
That would surprise me a great deal if it were true.
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dns_snek 5 days ago
git CLI and various GUIs are awful in different ways. CLI is awfully inconsistent and hard to learn, but GUIs obfuscate what's happening behind the scenes and make it harder to recover from mistakes.
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IshKebab 5 days ago
> but GUIs obfuscate what's happening behind the scenes and make it harder to recover from mistakes.

I disagree. "What's happening behind the scenes" is not the corresponding CLI command - it's the actual modification to the commit graph, and GUIs are much better at exposing what is happening. Think about something like a rebase. Find any article explaining Git rebase. It will have diagrams showing what happens to the commits and those diagrams are exactly what a Git GUI displays!

To follow my filesystem analogy, when you move a file, the thing that's happening behind the scenes is that the file is moved, not `mv A B`.

> make it harder to recover from mistakes.

Also disagree. I'm not sure what you're talking about exactly but assuming reflog, then most GUIs don't support that and you're going to have to use the CLI in either case. But "GUIs don't cover this rare feature" isn't a reason to ditch them completely.

I agree there are a lot of awful GUIs though. It doesn't help that the Git website lists dozens of them and only 2 or 3 are any good. My recommendation: if you use VSCode, the Git Graph extension. If you want a standalone tools, SourceGit or maybe GitX if you're on Mac.

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