this post was submitted on 08 Nov 2023
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Programming
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I usually use a gui but I know plenty of colleagues who exclusively use cli. I've never understood if it's an ego thing or what but it's an incredibly popular way to use git
I exclusively use CLI, it's not ego at all, I simply find typing what I want to be quicker than clicking buttons. I've written a bunch of aliases to automate my common workflows.
When I need to help a colleague who's made a mess of something, I can easily give them the command to fix it rather than finding the right options in their GUI of choice and it's often because of some broken abstraction in the GUI they got into the mess in the first place.
Yeah there are totally commands I use daily, but the visualization involved in looking at the log and available branches (which is a constant use case) is much easier in a gui for me. In fact I'd go as far as saying logs, diffs, and branching in cli are neigh unusable. The buttons I click while in the gui (like fetch/pull/commit) are largely used because at that point (after finding and checking out the right branch, etc) it would be slower to switch back to cli.
I only mentioned ego because I've seen multiple junior devs struggling with the command line resist using a gui even when it solves a specific problem they are having quite easily. To each their own though.
I use the CLI for simple commands, especially if helping someone on another PC and I don't have access to my preferred tool, but I honestly don't get people who use it religiously and never even try tools with GUIs. The convenience of being able to easily see the commit history, scroll through it, have a right click context menu or ability to just click it and see file changes (and then right click those files for additional options), is just something I can't abandon. Nowadays even the aliasing can be replicated in those tools if they support creation of custom commands so even that is a moot point - with some setup you can be as fast as with a CLI.
Exactly my same thoughts!
Meh I find I can do 95% of what I need through the cli just fine. Diff-ing can be annoying if you just want to skim through a commit but otherwise I don't see what I miss by using the cli