4 ms·

I use magit and everything seems a lot less wrong :). I personally found Mercurials a lot more palatable but at this stage git is pretty much ubiquitous.

by Guthur 6y ago

crdrost 6y ago
I was trying to explain Mercurial to other folks at a Subversion shop to make the case for DVCS to them, seemed like it'd be easier to describe the shift from SVN to Hg rather than SVN to Git. As part of this I drew a diagram on a whiteboard I had put up in my cubicle, which I then forgot to erase. A week later I was in the middle of coding when one of the nontechnical people from the company came by my cubicle, I motioned for him to wait a minute for me to finish what I was writing before talking to him, which he did. When I finally looked up, "okay, what's up," he said "first, let me see if I got the gist of this diagram. Inside of a folder you have this repository file named .hg..." and proceeded to give me a half-good explanation of how Mercurial works. And I was just floored and I said "yep, yep, there you go," and at the end he was like "so why do we save all of these things in Fileserv with a timestamp at the end?" and I was like "well I'll send you a link to TortoiseHg and you can just start using it, but yeah most people just want to do the thing that's in front of them and don't want to learn a whole tool that does things differently to get started." (And sadly that was true and as far as I know he also never invested the time to learn TortoiseHg and get started with that, haha.) Left an impression on me, for sure.
globular-toast 6y ago
Magit is by far the best way to use git. I've been the git expert at every job I've been in but I owe it all to magit. It really can't be overstated how big of a game changer it is. I've thought about writing a stand-alone TUI version for people who are scared of emacs. But then I realise it's impossible. Magit is inseparable from emacs. Emacs is what makes it so powerful. Emacs is not a text editor, it's an environment for interacting with text-based tools. Having your text editor and git, as well as every other text tool, in the same environment with the same interface is unbeatable.
- iudqnolq 6y ago
  I'm also a big fan of magit. I used to use emacs for everything, but I found myself taking longer to do tasks on average and having an unacceptably high worst case of a day spent debugging why it's borked. Now I only use emacs for magit. I'm currently working on a magit TUI in Rust. It's very early stages. I'm hoping even if the project fails at least I'll understand git a lot better.
jcranmer 6y ago
> I personally found Mercurials a lot more palatable but at this stage git is pretty much ubiquitous. What I really want at this point is somebody to build a mercurial frontend for the git backend, so that I get to use the clean frontend of mercurial to work with git repos. No, hg-git doesn't really work for this purpose, and I have tried it for my work git repos (which are in the 100k of commit range). Apparently, there's a new git extension for mercurial that is closer to the model I want, but I haven't had a chance to try it yet.
- Guthur 6y ago
  I've had hg said to be the James Bond to git's MacGyver.
anarazel 6y ago
It's interesting. I had to use mercurial for work at some point and I just could not get comfortable with it. I know several people that feel like me, and several that feel the same about git. I wonder what the difference leading to that are.
- sio8ohPi 6y ago
  In my case, I got accustomed to very rebase heavy workflows in git, and history rewriting in mercurial feels feels tacked on. With git, the repo is basically just a DAG plus refs, and once you understand that model, it mostly makes sense. hg has... three? four? different ways to rewrite history, that all work in different ways under the hood. It's not that bad once you realize you should just use the evolve extension and ignore everything else, but as a novice it's hard to know which method to use, and it's not hard to stumble upon people recommending awful footguns like `rollback`.

I use magit and everything seems a lot less wrong :). I personally found Mercurials a lot more palatable but at this stage git is pretty much ubiquitous.

by Guthur 6y ago

I use magit and everything seems a lot less wrong :). I personally found Mercurials a lot more palatable but at this stage git is pretty much ubiquitous.

crdrost 6y ago

I was trying to explain Mercurial to other folks at a Subversion shop to make the case for DVCS to them, seemed like it'd be easier to describe the shift from SVN to Hg rather than SVN to Git. As part of this I drew a diagram on a whiteboard I had put up in my cubicle, which I then forgot to erase. A week later I was in the middle of coding when one of the nontechnical people from the company came by my cubicle, I motioned for him to wait a minute for me to finish what I was writing before talking to him, which he did. When I finally looked up, "okay, what's up," he said "first, let me see if I got the gist of this diagram. Inside of a folder you have this repository file named .hg..." and proceeded to give me a half-good explanation of how Mercurial works. And I was just floored and I said "yep, yep, there you go," and at the end he was like "so why do we save all of these things in Fileserv with a timestamp at the end?" and I was like "well I'll send you a link to TortoiseHg and you can just start using it, but yeah most people just want to do the thing that's in front of them and don't want to learn a whole tool that does things differently to get started." (And sadly that was true and as far as I know he also never invested the time to learn TortoiseHg and get started with that, haha.) Left an impression on me, for sure.

globular-toast 6y ago

Magit is by far the best way to use git. I've been the git expert at every job I've been in but I owe it all to magit. It really can't be overstated how big of a game changer it is. I've thought about writing a stand-alone TUI version for people who are scared of emacs. But then I realise it's impossible. Magit is inseparable from emacs. Emacs is what makes it so powerful. Emacs is not a text editor, it's an environment for interacting with text-based tools. Having your text editor and git, as well as every other text tool, in the same environment with the same interface is unbeatable.

iudqnolq 6y ago
I'm also a big fan of magit. I used to use emacs for everything, but I found myself taking longer to do tasks on average and having an unacceptably high worst case of a day spent debugging why it's borked. Now I only use emacs for magit. I'm currently working on a magit TUI in Rust. It's very early stages. I'm hoping even if the project fails at least I'll understand git a lot better.

jcranmer 6y ago

> I personally found Mercurials a lot more palatable but at this stage git is pretty much ubiquitous. What I really want at this point is somebody to build a mercurial frontend for the git backend, so that I get to use the clean frontend of mercurial to work with git repos. No, hg-git doesn't really work for this purpose, and I have tried it for my work git repos (which are in the 100k of commit range). Apparently, there's a new git extension for mercurial that is closer to the model I want, but I haven't had a chance to try it yet.

Guthur 6y ago
I've had hg said to be the James Bond to git's MacGyver.

anarazel 6y ago

It's interesting. I had to use mercurial for work at some point and I just could not get comfortable with it. I know several people that feel like me, and several that feel the same about git. I wonder what the difference leading to that are.

sio8ohPi 6y ago
In my case, I got accustomed to very rebase heavy workflows in git, and history rewriting in mercurial feels feels tacked on. With git, the repo is basically just a DAG plus refs, and once you understand that model, it mostly makes sense. hg has... three? four? different ways to rewrite history, that all work in different ways under the hood. It's not that bad once you realize you should just use the evolve extension and ignore everything else, but as a novice it's hard to know which method to use, and it's not hard to stumble upon people recommending awful footguns like `rollback`.