git was a great breakthrough in terms of performance and supporting distributed workflows, but now like many technological breakthroughs there needs to be an in

git was a great breakthrough in terms of performance and supporting distributed workflows, but now like many technological breakthroughs there needs to be an interface that exposes completely different abstractions based on the user's workflows rather than the implementation's data structures. For example, why can't I do something like git view filename -3 # shows file before last 3 changes _made_to_the_file_ (irrespective of how many commits) git view filename $date # shows state of file at date git revert filename $date | number # roll back a specific file to what it looked like at $date or file version I have the feeling that the developers of git even understand this, but they needed to get git out the door and assumed the community would build the layer atop git to make it more user-friendly. Sadly, attempts to make git user-friendly have so far boiled down to GUIs rather than introducing new concepts. Certainly the current collection of shell scripts that exist as the ui for git definately have a hackish feel to them.