81–90 of 490 posts
The most painful mistakes beginers endure with git are irrevocable code removal from the current working directory because of bad usage of `git clean`, `git reset` (or `git merge` if you're brutish enough). This problem cannot be solved by using git, because git doesn't have any reference to such code.
> novice users are terrified of it. When they make a mistake, many would rather delete and re-clone the repository than try to fix it In my experience most beginners use a GUI like Atlassian Sourcetree or the Github desktop client. It's a lot harder to make mistakes using the GUI in my experience. I still really like this idea though; eventually a subset of the beginners wants to learn the git cli and that sure seems…
It's not as easy to use as SourceTree, but since there's no SourceTree for Linux, it works well enough.
Damn, this is such a GREAT idea. I've messed up repos a few times, and it's never good. It's always -- "what's the magic want I have to wave now"? The truth is, while we use git every day, most people really don't understand how it works. There I said it. And I'm not ashamed. I don't really know how Git works. And I think I'm not the only one. What does "git reflog" or "git reset --hard ...." do? What are the implica…
`git reflog` shows the commits where your current branch pointer has been.
`git reset --hard` moves your current branch pointer and to the given commit, then modifies your working directory to match that commit. `--soft` moves the branch pointer and does not modify your working directory. `--mixed` moves the branch pointer, does not modify your working directory, but does clear staging.
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For some reason people love to defend the obscure and strange and oftentimes objectively terrible Git CLI. I’ve found Mercurial much more straightforward for my (mundane and boring but prevalent) use cases, and I lament that it isn’t more widely used.
Every single time we are discussing git this comment shows up. But why is one popular when the other one is so much better? I guess we will never know
Agreed. When I was learning to climb the instructor told me I would never reach my full potential until after the first fall. You cannot work at your limit until you trust the rope.
However, I think this is still avoiding the rope. Git is really simple and when you understand it it's hard to go wrong. I really think what git is missing is a better user interface. Magit is the only one I'm aware of.
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Are you using Git via GUI(s)? Between my colleagues, there is a strong correlation between using a GUI, and messing up the repository. I agree that Git's UX is pretty bad (checkout overloading; overlapping between checkout and reset; push overloading... yikes!), however, I believe that in contexts where using Git is a constraint, stop using GUIs is the best strategy one can apply to improve the understanding.
I use Git via the GitHub Desktop client ( https://desktop.github.com ) and find it _very easy_ to use Git without issue by following a simple rule: don't be clever. I have branches, I commit, I squash merge via a Pull Request. No rebasing, no moving commits around. There might be workflows where rebasing etc. are important and certainly in those cases, using a GUI is probably not a great idea -- but it's certainly po…
Git is really weird but useful.
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Are you using Git via GUI(s)? Between my colleagues, there is a strong correlation between using a GUI, and messing up the repository. I agree that Git's UX is pretty bad (checkout overloading; overlapping between checkout and reset; push overloading... yikes!), however, I believe that in contexts where using Git is a constraint, stop using GUIs is the best strategy one can apply to improve the understanding.
Not a single person I’ve met using git in the last decade has thrived using a UI for it.
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Are you using Git via GUI(s)? Between my colleagues, there is a strong correlation between using a GUI, and messing up the repository. I agree that Git's UX is pretty bad (checkout overloading; overlapping between checkout and reset; push overloading... yikes!), however, I believe that in contexts where using Git is a constraint, stop using GUIs is the best strategy one can apply to improve the understanding.
Not a single person I’ve met using git in the last decade has thrived using a UI for it.
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I understand how git works, and I still can't use it. There are three problems: 1. Despite the claim that git never loses data, there are actually some dangerous operations that will irretrievably nuke your work with no warning. Git checkout is the canonical example. This makes me very gun-shy about doing anything that I'm not intimately familiar with. 2. Git's merge is not smart enough to realize that identical chan…
There is a design for undoing changes to the staging area: https://github.com/arxanas/git-branchless/issues/10 The similar project [Jujube]( https://github.com/martinvonz/jj ) has experimented with backing up even unstaged changes after every command, and apparently it works well for them, so we could do the same in the above design. Undoing even untracked changes might be a bit much.
Take branching, which is something you're supposed to be doing all the time. So abstractly, I want to be able to get a list of my current branches, create a new branch, check out an existing branch, delete an existing branch, and maybe rename a branch. I would expect the commands for these operations to be something like:
git branch list
git branch create [name]
git branch delete [name]
git branch rename [old-name] [new-name]
None of these things are actually the case. Git checkout will clobber unsaved changes in my working directory. "Git branch list" is just "git branch". "git branch create" is "git branch [name]". So creating a branch is the SAME COMMAND as the one you use to produce a list of current branches, just with an argument. Madness. And this is the rule, not the exception. Minor variations on a theme can result in radically different commands with various mysterious arguments. There is no rhyme or reason or regularity. The only way to know is to look it up.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Are you using Git via GUI(s)? Between my colleagues, there is a strong correlation between using a GUI, and messing up the repository. I agree that Git's UX is pretty bad (checkout overloading; overlapping between checkout and reset; push overloading... yikes!), however, I believe that in contexts where using Git is a constraint, stop using GUIs is the best strategy one can apply to improve the understanding.
Not a single person I’ve met using git in the last decade has thrived using a UI for it.
I do most of my git through one or another UI (right now, mainly the integrated functionality in VSCode, a gitflow workflow extension for VSCode, and repository history graph extension for VSCode that supports doing operations against branches/tags/commits from the graph.) I feel loke I’m thriving that way.
Its not a substitute for knowing git, though, and I think that people who lean on a UI as a substitute for knowing what is going on underneath rather than as a convenience layer are not likely to thrive.