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Comment by zdragnar | Hacker News Reader

The command failed, with a clear error message, and a direct instruction on exactly how to redolve it. That is good UX.

Your example boils down to not knowing the word "upstream". I would argue that is table stakes domain knowledge for decentralized version control, and is trivially easy to search for. That does not make bad UX.

Good UX does not eliminate the need for domain knowledge, it eliminates incidental complexity from a user's task, and one could argue makes a tool pleasant to use.

I don't disagree that there are rough edges to git (the debate over merge vs rebase is a glaring example), but "just plain terrible in every way" is gross hyperbole.

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Sorry but if the error gives you the right command to run first time then it should just run it first time by default. Sane defaults for new users is good UX. Not an error telling you exactly what command to run instead. It already knows what you intended, for Christ sakes, because it's telling you what you should copy and paste instead!

It's not necessarily always the correct command to run, it's just suggesting what you probably want to do.

Which should be the default, based on popular use. You can always use the command it suggests to do something different.

Well considering how many people who now know git and understand it, it doesn't make sense to do that necessarily. Rather they should make it a configurable option which do now see push.default (https://git-scm.com/docs/git-config)

Right, which means changing it will harm the UX due to ingrained pattern. That's not what I'm arguing for.

I'm arguing against the idea that showing an error message with the exact command to use is good UX - see the original comment. It is not.

But it doesn't know what you intended. It's guessing. The consequences of guessing incorrectly could be very, very bad, as you are pushing your code to a remote host.

Again, the whole point of git is that it is decentralized; there is no requirement that you have one single central server that you are pushing to; there could easily be multiple places that you might want to push something to.

Using something as default that makes sense for a centralized VCS when git is not centralized is, imho, worse than bad UX, as it teaches incorrect assumptions.

Again, this is table-stakes knowledge for using decentralized version control.

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