logoalt Hacker News

throwaway27448yesterday at 1:56 PM1 replyview on HN

> because git famously has a terrible UI

Thankfully, github has zero control over git. If they did have control they would have sank the whole operation on year one

> because somebody would have looked at the stats and for instance have added "git restore" right from the very start, because "git checkout -- foo.txt" is an absolutely unintuitive command.

How is git restore any better? Restoring what from when? At least git checkout is clear in what it does.


Replies

dale_glassyesterday at 2:17 PM

> How is git restore any better? Restoring what from when? At least git checkout is clear in what it does.

And this is exactly where disconnects happen, and where you need telemetry or something like it to tell you how your users actually use the system, rather than imagining how they should.

A technical user deep into the guts of Git thinks "you need to check out again this specific file".

A novice thinks "I want to restore this file to the state it had before I touched it".

Now we can argue about whether "restore" is the ideal word here, but all the same, end users tend to think it terms of "I want to undo what I did", and not in terms of git internals.

So a hypothetical git with telemetry would probably show people repeatedly trying "git restore", "git undo", "git revert", etc, trying to find an undo command.

show 3 replies