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What were your misconceptions about Git when you first started? (self.git)

submitted 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) by canpolat to c/git

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I used CVS and ClearCase before moving into Git, and it took me some time to adjust to the fact that the cost of branching in Git is much much less than ClearCase. And getting into the "distributed" mindset didn't happen overnight.

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[–] [email protected] 17 points 11 months ago (21 children)

That given its popularity it would be more user friendly. Every good dev tool will have its internals or more advanced features. Git is no different. But it sure feels like it never took the idea of a polished user experience seriously. Which is fine. It’s a dev tool after all. But the UI conversation around git has been going on long enough (here included) that there has to have been a significant global productivity cost due to the lack of a better UI.

[–] lysdexic -2 points 11 months ago (9 children)

Git is no different. But it sure feels like it never took the idea of a polished user experience seriously.

I've seen this sort of opinion surface often,but it never comes with specific examples. This takes away from the credibility of any of these claims.

Can you provide a single example that you feel illustrates the roughest aspect of Git's user experience?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 11 months ago (4 children)

I mean sure. I personally haven't researched and become an expert on this ... it is an early-user's misconceptions thread after all. And a dev can justifiably reflect on all of their tooling and consider their general usability against their popularity.

However, by the same token, your lack of any counter examples isn't exactly highly credible either.

Nonetheless:

Whenever I've seen an opinion from someone who's used both mercurial and git, their opinion is always that the mercurial interface and model "actually makes sense"
AFAICT, the git CLI (at least up until the more recent changes) has widely been recognised as being unnecessarily janky and confusing especially for common and basic tasks
Apart from that, many devs have shared that they always struggle to remember git commands and always need to rely on some reference/cheat-sheet (obligatory XKCD), which IMO is a product of it both having a poor CLI in need of polish and being a program/tool that isn't naturally constrained to CLI usage but rather naturally implemented with a graphical of some sort.

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