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I read the page, but it's just a short introduction to some of the commands in gitless; and they're not at all different from git in concept either, except for

I read the page, but it's just a short introduction to some of the commands in gitless; and they're not at all different from git in concept either, except for the hiding of the index. It does nothing to answer "why" gitless exists, and why its creators think it's better than git. I identified several points where gitless' UI is in fact worse than git and as such am not likely to switch, but I am still interested in the rationale behind gitless' UI decisions. I often see people disparaging git's UI, but honestly, I can't see the problem anymore. Certainly there are weird bits (eg. git diff --cached) in the UI that I've learned by heart now, but I've also learned git's internals -- which doesn't require much investment at all since git is extremely simple -- and in light of that knowledge, git's behaviour is consistent and easily predictable.

StavrosK 12y ago
> Certainly there are weird bits (eg. git diff --cached) in the UI that I've learned by heart now That's the thing, if you've learnt them, gitless is useless to you. I'm not interested in learning whether a branch is deleted with -d or -D or git rm branch or whichever one they used for that specific command, so gitless making them all consistent is definitely an improvement.
- chousuke 12y ago
  I don't think you're seeing my point. The documentation doesn't do anything to convince the reader that gitless' UI is more consistent than git's. Let's pretend I'm a newbie. All I see in the documentation are a list of commands that have pretty much 1:1 mappings in git. How is it better?
  - StavrosK 12y ago
    They aren't, though. Have you seen how removals for anything use the same option, or there's no push or pull, or remotes are much more sane, or creating repos is the same regardless of whether you're cloning or initting? It's much more geared towards actions rather than commands.
    - chousuke 12y ago
      That's the thing. I haven't seen anything, because the documentation doesn't mention it. You might be entirely justified, but I can't tell because neither you or the documentation elaborate on any of my questions. gitless remotes look exactly the same as git remotes as far as I can tell. Why are they saner? git init vs. git clone is a triviality, though I'll grant you that init works for both use cases publish is just a synonym for push, and pull is what gitless seems to call merge. gitless seems to outright ignore the fetch/merge distinction. How do I fetch commits from a remote repository without merging them? Overall the impression I get from that single web page of documentation is that gitless is a porcelain that misses the point on many things. I realize I might be completely wrong, but gitless' documentation neither answers my questions nor encourages me to try it out. You're seeing negative comments wondering about gitless' purpose because the introduction fails to offer any motivation.

StavrosK 12y ago

> Certainly there are weird bits (eg. git diff --cached) in the UI that I've learned by heart now That's the thing, if you've learnt them, gitless is useless to you. I'm not interested in learning whether a branch is deleted with -d or -D or git rm branch or whichever one they used for that specific command, so gitless making them all consistent is definitely an improvement.

chousuke 12y ago
I don't think you're seeing my point. The documentation doesn't do anything to convince the reader that gitless' UI is more consistent than git's. Let's pretend I'm a newbie. All I see in the documentation are a list of commands that have pretty much 1:1 mappings in git. How is it better?
- StavrosK 12y ago
  They aren't, though. Have you seen how removals for anything use the same option, or there's no push or pull, or remotes are much more sane, or creating repos is the same regardless of whether you're cloning or initting? It's much more geared towards actions rather than commands.
  - chousuke 12y ago
    That's the thing. I haven't seen anything, because the documentation doesn't mention it. You might be entirely justified, but I can't tell because neither you or the documentation elaborate on any of my questions. gitless remotes look exactly the same as git remotes as far as I can tell. Why are they saner? git init vs. git clone is a triviality, though I'll grant you that init works for both use cases publish is just a synonym for push, and pull is what gitless seems to call merge. gitless seems to outright ignore the fetch/merge distinction. How do I fetch commits from a remote repository without merging them? Overall the impression I get from that single web page of documentation is that gitless is a porcelain that misses the point on many things. I realize I might be completely wrong, but gitless' documentation neither answers my questions nor encourages me to try it out. You're seeing negative comments wondering about gitless' purpose because the introduction fails to offer any motivation.