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Comment by gum_ina_package | Hacker News Reader

Is anyone else getting tired of seeing all these "git tips", "cheatsheets", and "helpers" on here? While these all may look cool and be flashy, I've never used a single one that's showed up on the front page. Personally, I find the man pages + Google to be good enough. Then again, maybe I'm a curmudgeon.

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You're not a curmudgeon, but I'll wager you've been using git for a while now. Here's the problem I have with git -- it has one of the worst CLIs I've ever seen. Many command names are counter-intuitive, i.e. they don't do anything that you would assume from the name alone. To make things worse, most commands can do rather different things depending on the command line switches.

This is all something that people can get used to, but the problem spills over from CLI into GUIs, because GUI authors try to make their programs more newbie-friendly and use more sane command names and lingo. As a result, no two GUIs will use exactly the same names for the same actions.

So imagine a newcomer to git, who starts using a GUI and gets used to its lingo. Unfortunately, that newcomer can't easily communicate with other people who use other GUIs or CLIs. Worse, sooner or later the newcomer will have to resort to using the CLI or a combination of different GUIs, because there's always some useful git feature that you either can't do in the GUI or is an order of magnitude easier to do from the command line.

That, in my not-so-humble opinion, is the worst problem with git. To me, this is sort of tragicomic, because git is absolutely the best VCS I've ever used.

As an author of a Git GUI, I've thought about this problem a lot. git-cola is quite user friendly, but its target audience is specifically power users (I wrote it for myself). I don't like dumbing things down for new users.

If you think about it -- targeting new users is not the ideal for a maker-centric tool. A master chef uses the sharpest knife around. The new chef is only new for so long before he graduates up.

I found Bzr much easier to learn than Git, and I'm not aware of architectural powers that Git has which bzr doesn't.

Yes, yes you are because man pages are _terrible_ to read especially if you don't know what to even look for. I can see them being useful if you are already familiar with the product and just want to double check what a feature does; but as a newbie? Showing me the man pages would make me want to bail.

"How can I marge this branch to master?"

"Just check the man pages."

"But what am I looking fo-"

"Man pages."

I see the manpages mainly as reference, not as initial introduction.

No I'm not tired of it at all. I think it is more than cool and flashy, as it does a great job of showing how changes move between each part of the repo. This is great for beginners. The man page and google is good enough, but this is a great addition.

My recommendation is always just to read Pro Git from cover to cover.

Me too. This is an excellent resource. Cheat sheets hide what is happening and thus limit understanding.

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