Hacker News Reader

No, I don't agree. Git has great documentation but if you want to know how to use it you either spend 15 minutes reading the relevant part of the big free book or you Google for a cheat sheet. Same goes for vim. I don't know why but some people are satisfied with documentation which, although not incorrect, only makes sense when you already have a substantial understanding of the topic at hand.

View on HN

Nonsense, you can also read the man pages, and if any of these resources are insufficient you should spend any time you would have spent writing a cheat sheet contributing improvements to the actual resources - the documentation is an open-source community project as much as the project itself is.

Sounds like a bit of a waste of time to me. What are the odds Linus is going to update the git documentation with my list of handy shortcuts? He'll just swear at me. I don't think the official documentation is the place for it; not now it's been written the way it has. I'm happy with the book + my notes on gitlab.

Well, for one, Linus isn't the current maintainer of Git. It's currently Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>, someone whose main responsibility in open source is looking after git, who has the time and inclination to review your contributions thoughtfully. Have you ever actually read a git man page? Or do you just get all of your git knowledge from scattered blog posts and cheat sheets? No wonder people think git is hard. Read a random git man page right now and you'll find it quite pleasant to read and containing a plethora of useful information.

You also need to have http://ohshitgit.com handy

Reply on news.ycombinator.com