Yes. I teach git professionally and when I do, my approach is to stick to describing the nuts and bolts. Once people use it from the command line and get thing

Yes. I teach git professionally and when I do, my approach is to stick to describing the nuts and bolts. Once people use it from the command line and get things done, they (usually) understand what's going on pretty well but are annoyed by the nitty gritties of the command line. Then they're ready to move on to a tool of their choice but can always map the actions there back to the data structures inside git so they've never lost. Also, they can always drop back down to the command line for any low level surgery that the client doesn't provide. I use magit myself for most things.