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It's not that it's hard to believe, I've seen enough discussion on this very topic to know many people (at least on HN) seem to prefer the CLI for VCS interacti
by 9dev 3y ago
It's not that it's hard to believe, I've seen enough discussion on this very topic to know many people (at least on HN) seem to prefer the CLI for VCS interaction.
I'm merely wondering why people seem to prefer a lower-level, separate tool to a higher-level, integrated one. To me it seems similar to writing your Makefile by hand vs. using automake.
The same as you, I don't want to dismiss anyone's tooling. Just curious :-)
- akkartik 3y agoI think there are two dynamics at play: * Low-level tools come out and become robust sooner than high-level ones. It makes sense to learn them when no alternatives exist. Once alternatives are mature they're more effort to learn. I'm just much less fluent with an IDE than I am with the commandline, and the ubiquity of the commandline has meant I haven't been forced to learn to use the IDE well. * There's some value to shaving off levels of dependencies. An IDE sends commands to git. There's just more moving parts and more to go wrong compared to just using git. When things go wrong, you don't have to understand two levels of error messages. Even when things are right, things can be slower. git is designed with obsession for large repos. Many UI screens might not scale as well as the underlying command providing them data. In my experience most low-level people as you put it focus on the second reasoning. You don't use git in an IDE because you prefer to use Vim over an IDE, etc. But the first seems valid as well.
- mixmastamyk 3y agoScripting and automation are the goal ultimately. Working at the CLI supports that, GUI often doesn't. While I do like to see things in a GUI at times, ultimately it all gets encoded in scripts for automation and CI purposes. So terminals continue to be the focus.