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Comment by na85 | Hacker News Reader

I don't think it's asking to have one's hand held to complain about git's poor interface. There's no reason other than lazy design to have a tool where to show all remotes it's

$ git remote -v

But to show all branches it's

$ git branch -a

It's like it's been purposefully designed to be obtuse.

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It seems like you've made this example obtuse.

`git remote` and `git branch` list the remotes and branches respectively.

Adding -v makes both of these verbose. It will additionally show what each branch/remote is "pointing at".

Adding -a to `git branch` shows remote tracking branches in additional to local branches. This not normally interesting so the default is to list only local branches.

...yes, remote tracking branches are interesting as well, I don't know a situation where they wouldn't be.

There's plenty of weirdness in Git, but honestly my main complaint is that the interface is awful and the documentation makes Dostoyevski look modern and sleek.

You clearly have not ever worked on repos where nobody ever cleans up after themselves as far as feature branches go. I'm working with repos with remote branches numbering in the hundreds. `git branch -a` is pretty useless at this point unless paired with grep.

this is what I have my alias set to - `git branch -a --sort=-committerdate`

That's just by accident. There's plenty of obtuse git commands , strange command names, non-standardized parameters, etc.

We're all talking about learning the internals of git and how it works, not it's poorly formed command lines. Pointing out how shitty the interface can be doesn't mean you shouldn't learn how your tools work.

You say potato, I say potato. If the interface is clunky, you will learn by heart some switches and pass them on as cargo cult.

>We're all talking about learning the internals of git and how it works, not it's poorly formed command lines.

But the argument is being put forward that to understand the command lines you have to understand the internals.

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