I find people are religious about being git cli purists and only interacting with it in this black box (the terminal). On top of that a lot of people stop learning git after add commit push pull branch and merge so concepts like rebasing and cherry picking are scary. In this day and age we have state of the art GUI tools that change the game and allow git users to see and interact with the state of a git repository i…
I would humbly suggest you avoid framing it that way, even if you believe it’s true. From someone who is only sometimes a cli advocate, my immediate assumption is that your opinion here may be formed out of naïveté and a bit of fear of the cli.
Please note I’m actually quite a fan of using various GUI tools for basic git workflows, and things like branching diagrams and even diffs are much better in GUI tools than in the console. Some of the tools are damn good and damn convenient most of the time. So you’ll get a huge amount of agreement from me about the benefits of sometimes using GUIs.
But git was designed around the command line, and there are no GUI tools (Kraken included) that have UI for everything or even most of what git can do. Advanced workflows and repo spelunking often require the command line. Using the cli is the only interface that can do everything, and it’s the advanced interface, so telling people who are already advanced (possibly more advanced than you) and already comfortable on the command line that they’ll find enlightenment in GUI tools isn’t always or even generally true. It’s not hard on the command line to see everyone else’s remote branches. Better to listen to them, and suggest GUI tools only when they express frustration about their workflow that you think a GUI can help with. Also perhaps better to ask the about CLI workflows and find out some of the benefits. One benefit is that CLI workflows are always usable over basic ssh connections.
And worth mentioning, the question’s partially moot for people using Github or other hosting services where some GUI tools are built-in. Using the CLI for all interactions with Github, and using the site for the visualizing diffs & branches is totally reasonable.
> I’ve worked on teams that just didn’t rebase at all and I think people are oblivious to the mess they make
I have to fully back you up and agree there! It’s unfortunate that rebase is a little scary and that some people just don’t like it. Rebasing local work before publishing it is the way git was designed to work, and it’s extremely helpful for creating a history that’s not insane. Squash commits are better than nothing I guess, but you can really tell and appreciate when people are comfortable with rebase and care whether their history is presentable.