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Comment by chrisfosterelli | Hacker News Reader

In fairness, git has improved on this and separated these into `git switch` / `git restore`

Yeah, but they denied the problem for the longest time, so they deserve some flak for it :)

Probably true. IMO the crime of checkout is that the command really is `git checkout <tree> -- <path>`, which updates that local path to match that git tree, but it implicitly fills `tree` with the current branch and `path` with all files.

It actually makes sense if you learn the full command but makes zero sense when you google individual common operations and then they thought "this command should also have a shorthand to create branches" I suppose

I don't even use *the multiple uses of `git checkout`. It may be suboptimal but I think it's easier to quickly recall in my mind-- `git branch name` to create a branch and `git checkout branch` to check out a branch.

`git checkout` for restoring files is dumb though, but as others have mentioned the UX has been improved with `git restore`

> It actually makes sense if you learn the full command but makes zero sense when you google individual common operations

I call this "hacker tunnel vision". It is a state afflicting a lot of programmers at the top of their game when it comes to writing end-user API and documentation. It can be summarized by "it is so obvious that people will think I'm mocking them for explaining this"

I had a calculus teacher who would routinely use IOTTMCO for various proofs. Intuitively Obvious to the Most Casual Observer, follow by a 5 page derivation

This is because git is a tool to interact with the git tree, not the mental models you've built on top of it or imported from other tools.

Git checkout covering multiple usecases makes sense to me, I've never thought, hey this is used for all these different things they should be separate. I think, hey, this tool is always checking out a hash and a path.

The fact that can be a branch or a commit is entirely inconsequential. If it irks you it's because you think there is a difference between a branch and a commit then you're likely lacking some fundamental understanding about git.

Git is a tool to get work done and is used by people besides programmers (sysadmins, data analysts). If people don't understand everything is a hashed commit its Git's fault for introducing distinctions without making the cli reflect those distinctions, not because those people didn't take a data structures course on Git.

First time I hear about this

`git status` will tell you about `git restore` if you have staged or uncommitted changes

`git status -s` also gives the shorthand version of this. I have it aliased to `gs` pretty much everywhere because it's really useful to me.

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