I totally agree about the unnecessary complexity of the git workflow. If you haven't seen it before, check out gitless: actual research-backed simplification o

I totally agree about the unnecessary complexity of the git workflow. If you haven't seen it before, check out gitless: actual research-backed simplification of the git commandline workflow. Reduced views of files and history are super useful, but unfortunately don't work in the case where you've browsed your way to a part of the code that you seldom work on, since you're less likely to have loaded them into your narrow slice: it's still nice to be able to fix spelling mistakes far afield, and the web editing helps nicely for that. What would help with the cases you describe, though, is a synthetic filesystem view, cache-faulted in as needed, like the one Microsoft is building. I'm pretty excited about where that's heading. https://github.com/Microsoft/GVFS https://github.com/Microsoft/GVFS for the project, https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/devops/2017/11/15/updates-to-gvfs/ https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/devops/2017/11/15/updates-t... for the announcement they're going to be working with Github. Pretty cool stuff.