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Comment by jarin | Hacker News Reader

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 :)

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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.

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?)

I love the cheat gem.

sudo gem install cheat

Then do :

cheat git

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

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

Awesome, thanks for sharing that alias.

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

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.

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