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by slavik81 4311 days ago
It's a little over-simplified, I think. In migrating some technical writers to git, I thought it might be a good tool to introduce people to git.

I ran into 5 problems:

1. It spit out vague error messages, requiring repeating the action in the CLI to see git's actual, specific problem.

2. There's no option to do the initial clone via ssh, which was a problem because http was failing to download the full repository.

3. It can't do merges, so you end up needing to use the git CLI anyways.

4. It crashed repeatedly while trying to handle large (1GB) repositories. Very sluggish and occasionally unresponsive on smaller repositories, too, especially with large single commits.

5. Various minor bugs. People would ask me stuff like 'how do I discard changes?' and I'd discover they'd gotten into a state where the menu would not appear until the software was restarted. They found it difficult to know when something confusing was inherent or a bug.

I wanted to love it, because it looks like it's good for beginners. Unfortunately, being pretty is not the same as being easy to use.

2 comments

I've found Sourcetree to be powerful, simple and beautiful. It is also clear and good for learning.
Huh. I didn't realize Sourcetree was available for Windows. That would have been worth a shot.

In the end, I introduced them to the git CLI, simply because I could always answer or find an answer to their questions about it.

I was able to get some people who were apprehensive about git on board after finding SourceTree.
I have run into 2, 3, 4, 5 as well. And in general, I often feel like the tool is not telling me what it is doing (especially while handling large repos when operations some time take considerably longer)

I have since switched to SourceTree and it is working out well so far.