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crispyambulancetoday at 1:09 PM6 repliesview on HN

I am convinced that the vast majority of professionals simply don't bother to remember and, ESPECIALLY WITH GIT, just look stuff up every single time the workflow deviates from their daily usage.

At this point perhaps a million person-years have been sacrificed to the semantically incoherent shit UX of git. I have loathed git from the beginning but there's effectively no other choice.

That said, the OP's commands are useful, I am copying them (because obviously I won't ever memorize them).


Replies

ngruhntoday at 8:55 PM

I don't even think git cli UX is that bad. Didn't git pioneer this sub-command style? Much better than like e.g. ffmpeg. Sure some aspects are confusing. I still don't understand why `checkout` is both for changing branches and clearing uncommitted changes. But overall I think the tool is amazing. I've not observed a bug in git once.

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alwillistoday at 5:23 PM

> At this point perhaps a million person-years have been sacrificed to the semantically incoherent shit UX of git. I have loathed git from the beginning but there's effectively no other choice.

Yes! We mostly wouldn’t tolerate the complexity and the terrible UX of a tool we use everyday--but there's enough Stockholm Syndrome out there where most of us are willing to tolerate it.

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freedombentoday at 2:30 PM

> I am convinced that the vast majority of professionals simply don't bother to remember and, ESPECIALLY WITH GIT, just look stuff up every single time the workflow deviates from their daily usage.

I wrote a cheat sheet in my notes of common commands, until they stuck in my head and I haven't needed it now for a decade or more. I also lean heavily on aliases and "self-documenting" things in my .bashrc file. Curious how others handle it. A search every time I need to do something would be too much friction for me to stand.

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dec0dedab0detoday at 6:24 PM

I just use my ide integrations for git. I absolutely love the way pycharm/jetbrains does it, and I'm starting to be ok with how vscode does. Remembering git commands besides the basics is just pointless. If I need to do something that the gui doesn't handle, I'll look it up and put it in a script.

weedhoppertoday at 2:01 PM

I’ve recently been looking into some tools that provide quick or painless help like pop up snippets with descriptions and cheat sheets, got any recommendations?

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awesome_dudetoday at 7:05 PM

The relevant XKCD comic https://xkcd.com/1597/

FWIW I too was once a "memorised a few commands and that was it" type of dev, then I read 3 chapters of the Git book https://git-scm.com/book/en/v2 (well really two, the first chapter was a "these are things you already know") and wow did my life with git change.