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> Matter of fact is: the git UX is awful and it punishes everyone who doesn't have have a high level understanding of how the underlying persistence model works
by sethrin 13y ago
> Matter of fact is: the git UX is awful and it punishes everyone who doesn't have have a high level understanding of how the underlying persistence model works.
I believe this is true, but reading through a description of how the underlying persistence model works was for me a revelatory experience. This was presented together with a description of the precise problem git was designed to solve in the O'Reilly book, Version Control with Git. It seemed to be a problem solved in every particular -- an exact solution, that rarest of all things. I did struggle with git before I read about it, which is why I picked up the book in the first place. Since then I have convinced myself that any failures with git are due to my own deficiencies and not its, but my tasks with git are far from exotic; I rarely encounter any difficulties.
The value in the software is not so much the UX, which I consider acceptable (at least with aliases), but in the underlying data model. For me, it is a tool of daily use, and so the knowledge required to use it is a trivial investment. If we were discussing something other than a command-line tool, I think I might be more amenable to the argument that a simpler UX is a better one. With the CLI though, you pretty much need to know what you're doing before you attempt to do it, and any problems with the process are rarely considered UX issues.
- johnbm 13y agoIsn't it a problem then that Git does not expose or visualize its internal model in any comprehensible way to its end users? That and the lack of instant undo seem ridiculous for a program designed to manage change.
- to3m 13y agogitk --all is excellent for this. I didn't really fully understand what git rebase was for until I worked through a few tests on my repository, refreshing the GUI after each command I typed.
- sethrin 13y agoIt has a steep learning curve. It is not optimized for novices. In my opinion, it does exactly what it should do internally, while I consider other tools to be deficient in some respects. In the common case, undo is provided by git commit --amend. For anything more complicated, I don't think that there is an explanation or GUI which could be considered "intuitive". I've used gitk and git-gui, and a variety of other visual interfaces before Reading the Figurative Manual, and while I'll be the first to cry my own ignorance, I have not found any of them to give much information about even the available options. What is cherry-picking? What about reverse cherry-picking? When would you want to use either? It's not impossible to design a user interface which would translate all of git's graph manipulations into a simple visual system. However, its current textual interface is extremely flexible, and it exposes a very useful scripting interface. It is a tool that rewards knowledge and experience, like emacs or vi(m). Which is not to say that it's necessarily a good value proposition to you, but it is (imo) a good time investment. One of these days I need to invest in vim too :(
- johnbm 13y agoEh? "Git undo" should restore the state of the repository to what it was before I typed the last command. How is this not the simplest and most intuitive implementation of this feature? Unix geeks, you make my head hurt with your stockholm syndrome.