Git Usability Debate

can you elaborate on why you think git is hard?

Git is famous for being unintuitive?

The length of the explanations in this thread says something about the usability of git. Not hating, just saying.

I developed a couple of tools on top of git for various reasons. The problem I found is that many many developers don’t understand how git actually works, so they can’t translate git and what it actually does. I have to explain how git works over and over again. I think git is extremely good compared to everything else and it’s extremely simple yet advanced. But people don’t seem to understand what it actually does. Trying to replace it with something else is going to be hard as I believe that a

git has a very clear, concise and stable interface if you understand how git works. it's designed this way, intentionally. people should stop complaining about it and either learn how to use it, switch to another tool or just write their own interface

Hi, author here. Since the target audience is people with little to no Git experience, a detailed comparison would not make sense. I did simply make that claim because the weirdness of Git's UI is usually justified by saying how powerful it is. So this statement is just intended to ease the readers mind that they're not missing out on power by choosing a tool that's easier to learn.

Can you explain why the learning curve on git is high? I have been using it for a couple of months after SVN completely dorked my project. I have not found git hard to use. What aspect of git is hard to learn?

git has no user interface. git expects its users to have an in depth understanding of its implementation details. These are failures of git. Ideally, studying abstruse man pages to avert disaster wouldn't be required of new users.

There are plenty of abstractions on top of git - most UI implementations abstract away the hard details, at the cost of not being able to understand what happens when something bad occurs because you never had to learn its intricacies prior. Seeing the consequences of such things it makes me appreciate git is left as raw interactions. Git is not for people that do not want to understand it. To me, it's similar to vim - its basic implementation is bare essentials and complicated concepts, but onc

The underyling concepts are fine, the problem with git for me is the inconsistent command line interface. Stuff I'm doing less often than once a month I have to check in the manual every time. And it's nothing inherently hard - stuff like removing one change from staging or cleaning up local branch to be exactly like remote. The interface just feels like stuff is arbitrarily assigned to different commands :)