>> developed without any concern for affording a good mental model of its operation to its users, and thus it is just a complex black box you chant arcane ritua

>> developed without any concern for affording a good mental model of its operation to its users, and thus it is just a complex black box you chant arcane rituals at That's not git, that's the command line - the interface with no inline visualization, no discoverability and no affordances. git is not its command line interface. I use the git CLI like I use curl: a powerful tool for occasional surgical or automated operations directly on underlying protocol. Most of the time I prefer something that better fits my workflow: for git, it's Git Extensions; for HTTP, it's Chrome.