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> I really don't understand what it is about Git that seems to prevent anybody from coming up with a sane UX for it. That's the problem. Git has a sane UX. The

> I really don't understand what it is about Git that seems to prevent anybody from coming up with a sane UX for it. That's the problem. Git has a sane UX. The only issue is that a lot of people who doesn't understand it, write silly tutorials where they spread their misconception about it. The real issue is the poor quality of tutorials over the internet that mislead a lot of people.

woojoo666 4y ago
I don't think the UX is that intuitive. If you want to tweak a commit that's not the branch head, you have to rebase the parent of that commit. From a technical standpoint this sort of makes sense, but for a casual user this is not intuitive at all
- mathstuf 4y ago
  You rebase onto the parent of that commit. The parent doesn't change. Or am I misunderstanding what you're describing here?
  - woojoo666 4y ago
    But the average casual user just wants to modify the commit. There could easily be a higher level command for this, which internally finds the parent and performs the rebase, but instead Git (and even most GUI tools on top) forces you to go the manual route of selecting the parent and initiating a rebase. It's counterintuitive
    - mathstuf 4y ago
      There is the ~ or ^ suffix to select a parentage. Also, vin-fugitive selects the parent automatically when you say "rebase starting here" on a commit under the cursor. Not sure what it does for merge commits; there's so great default there.
      - woojoo666 4y ago
        You still have to go through the "pick"/"reword" flow though. Most of the time people just want to modify a single commit. So why not just have a command for it, instead of needlessly exposing the low-level rebase process to the users
        shikoba 4y ago
        git commit --amend Or git rebase It's two simple command
        woojoo666 4y ago
        Git commit amend only works if you want to modify thr latest commit. Rebase is unnecessarily complicated if you just want to modify a single commit. It should be something more like `git edit [commit sha]`
        mathstuf 4y ago
        That gets complicated. What if there's a merge commit between here and there? How about a conflict? You cannot hide the underlying mechanism of reapplying a set of changes. On that note, I have written something like this, but it is not something I think belongs in the standard toolbox. It is a tool that applies "formatting" fixes to a topic, preserving history topology. However, it requires some automated tool to be able to perform the edit so that any conflicts can be resolved by running the tool to perform the edit (typically clang-format or autopep8, but sed or something like that is also a candidate). I don't know that requiring your edit to be expressed in terms of sed is suitable for such a "simple" tool to replace rebase.
        woojoo666 4y ago
        It would still use rebase in the background. If there's a conflict that happens when reapplying changes, then an error pops up, and the user can look into it and will start to understand the process. But in my experience of just doing quick patches on my private repos (where I do multiple small commits a day so patching an earlier commit is relatively common), a conflict rarely ever happens. I think I've run into it once in my many years of dev. So for the majority of users, they wouldn't have to even know about rebase until they have quite a bit of experience with git (and programming in general). It's a better learning curve, especially considering Git is now being taught to beginner programmers. A `git edit` command is not as powerful as `git rebase`, but this is just how UX works. You expose a smaller simpler set of features at the front, and then (if you aren't Apple) allow the users to do more advanced low-level operations if they need to.
- shikoba 4y ago
  > If you want to tweak a commit Here we are. You can't tweak a commit in git. You want to recreate a new one. That's why UX is awful, because there is a permanent confusion about what git does.
  - woojoo666 4y ago
    I know that rebasing creates a new commit (and all commits thereafter). As I said, from a technical standpoint I get it. But I don't see why there can't be a simple command or button that lets to modify a single commit, and performs the rebase behind the scenes. I commonly need it in my private repos and branches. But right now the rebase operation we're stuck with is very low-level and unintuitive.
bsder 4y ago
So why is it that every other source control system seems to have such nice tutorials? We can either posit that the people who made and use Git are substandard, or we can posit that there is something fundamental about Git that makes writing such tutorials difficult.

woojoo666 4y ago

I don't think the UX is that intuitive. If you want to tweak a commit that's not the branch head, you have to rebase the parent of that commit. From a technical standpoint this sort of makes sense, but for a casual user this is not intuitive at all

mathstuf 4y ago
You rebase onto the parent of that commit. The parent doesn't change. Or am I misunderstanding what you're describing here?
- woojoo666 4y ago
  But the average casual user just wants to modify the commit. There could easily be a higher level command for this, which internally finds the parent and performs the rebase, but instead Git (and even most GUI tools on top) forces you to go the manual route of selecting the parent and initiating a rebase. It's counterintuitive
  - mathstuf 4y ago
    There is the ~ or ^ suffix to select a parentage. Also, vin-fugitive selects the parent automatically when you say "rebase starting here" on a commit under the cursor. Not sure what it does for merge commits; there's so great default there.
    - woojoo666 4y ago
      You still have to go through the "pick"/"reword" flow though. Most of the time people just want to modify a single commit. So why not just have a command for it, instead of needlessly exposing the low-level rebase process to the users
      - shikoba 4y ago
        git commit --amend Or git rebase It's two simple command
        woojoo666 4y ago
        Git commit amend only works if you want to modify thr latest commit. Rebase is unnecessarily complicated if you just want to modify a single commit. It should be something more like `git edit [commit sha]`
        mathstuf 4y ago
        That gets complicated. What if there's a merge commit between here and there? How about a conflict? You cannot hide the underlying mechanism of reapplying a set of changes. On that note, I have written something like this, but it is not something I think belongs in the standard toolbox. It is a tool that applies "formatting" fixes to a topic, preserving history topology. However, it requires some automated tool to be able to perform the edit so that any conflicts can be resolved by running the tool to perform the edit (typically clang-format or autopep8, but sed or something like that is also a candidate). I don't know that requiring your edit to be expressed in terms of sed is suitable for such a "simple" tool to replace rebase.
        woojoo666 4y ago
        It would still use rebase in the background. If there's a conflict that happens when reapplying changes, then an error pops up, and the user can look into it and will start to understand the process. But in my experience of just doing quick patches on my private repos (where I do multiple small commits a day so patching an earlier commit is relatively common), a conflict rarely ever happens. I think I've run into it once in my many years of dev. So for the majority of users, they wouldn't have to even know about rebase until they have quite a bit of experience with git (and programming in general). It's a better learning curve, especially considering Git is now being taught to beginner programmers. A `git edit` command is not as powerful as `git rebase`, but this is just how UX works. You expose a smaller simpler set of features at the front, and then (if you aren't Apple) allow the users to do more advanced low-level operations if they need to.
shikoba 4y ago
> If you want to tweak a commit Here we are. You can't tweak a commit in git. You want to recreate a new one. That's why UX is awful, because there is a permanent confusion about what git does.
- woojoo666 4y ago
  I know that rebasing creates a new commit (and all commits thereafter). As I said, from a technical standpoint I get it. But I don't see why there can't be a simple command or button that lets to modify a single commit, and performs the rebase behind the scenes. I commonly need it in my private repos and branches. But right now the rebase operation we're stuck with is very low-level and unintuitive.

bsder 4y ago

So why is it that every other source control system seems to have such nice tutorials? We can either posit that the people who made and use Git are substandard, or we can posit that there is something fundamental about Git that makes writing such tutorials difficult.