Threaded merges are easy to screw up, that's why git invented that "rebase" crutch, both be-cause and the-cause it doesn't know which changes are in revision, only the file contents. Not sure how one can look at it and not see (or meet) the problem. "If you change different lines there will be no conflicts." Oh really, I guess I have had no have issues with merging in long branches then, good to know it was fine. You can merge back and forth and it just works. No one itt has merge anxiety, you just do it and it's all fine, and if there are conflicts, it's only for the same lines. Would be laughable if a thing like git had a huge engineering gap here, good thing it doesn't. /s

You can reset staged files again with ‘git reset’

To "revert a file to what was staged" you have to "git checkout" again, it seems, not "reset".

This is all basic stuff you should know if you are developing code with other people

Yeah. It seems that it is basic, until you try using it for something that is not quick one-shot patching of "append-only" code.

Not the parent commenter. Git the version control system is superb, fast, robust, well-thought out. Git the CLI tool is by far one of the worst CLIs I have ever had the misfortune of using. I think the one-dimensional, string-y command-line massively complicates mental and reasoning models for a tool with a fundamental data structure—a tree—that is multi-dimensional.

A powerful Git GUI makes even moderately-complicated actions like cherry-picking, interactive rebasing, and even ref-logging absolutely trivial. In fact it was precisely said GUI tool that allowed me to develop an intuition for how Git worked internally; the CLI does no such thing.

> Literally every one of those questions can be trivially googled. (In previous generations and fora, this is where you'd be mocked with LMGTFY links). You just, to continue to embrace the frame, don't want to do the work.

I find this an odd statement. I mean, no, I don't want to do the work! Not if it isn't necessary in the first place.

Take staging (or the index, because another of Git's foibles is poor naming conventions that stick around and confuse newcomers). It's kind of a commit, right? In the sense that it's a snapshot of work that represents a change to the code. Except we can't really make it behave like a commit, we have to interact with it using special commands until we turn it into a commit. Are these special commands really doing much differently than we might do with another commit? Not really.

Or take stashes. Stashes are more like commits — they even appear in the reflog! But they also aren't real commits either, in the sense that you can't check them out, or rebase them, or manipulate them directly. Again, you need a bunch of extra commands for working with the stash, when really they're just free-standing anonymous commits.

Or take branches. Branches are, as everyone knows, pointers to commits. So why is it important whether I'm checking out a branch or a commit? Why is one of these normal, but the other produces hideous warnings and looks like it loses me data if I haven't learned what a reflog is yet? And if a branch is just a pointer, why can't I move it around freely? I can push it forwards, but I can't move it to another arbitrary commit without fiddling around a lot. Why?

Or take tags, which are like branches, but they don't move. Is "moves" and "doesn't move" such a deeply important distinction that Git needs branches and two different kinds of tag?

---

To be clear, I think Git is a good tool, and I agree that once you've started to familiarise yourself with it, it's not so complicated in day-to-day usage. Yes, you'll probably need to Google a few specific commands every so often, but the general UX of the tool has significantly improved since the early days, and it is getting better.

That said, I also don't like the idea of settling with Git just because it's good. If there are alternatives out there that can do everything that Git can do, but with a simpler conceptual model, then I want to try them! (And, spoiler alert, I think there are better alternatives out there — in particular, I think Jujutsu is just as powerful as Git, if not more so, while simplifying and removing unnecessarily duplicated concepts.)

First I didn’t understand git, now I don’t want to do the work. Then I do the work but it doesn’t work. Feel free to LMGTFY me on the last question. Do you know the answer? Is there an answer? Can you do the work?

What a stupid series of sentences this is for a piece of software we have to use daily. Even talking about it feels cringe.