Yes, git’s UX is absolutely terrible. It is an abomination. It is the worst command line tool I’ve extensively used in that regard. For a long time I stubbornly used mercurial, which is vastly superior.

But, it has become a de facto standard. This is a tragedy. But it is a fact.

So it is best just to spend time learning it, find a subset of commands and make a cheat sheet you can refer to, and accept that the world is imperfect. Hopefully at some point in the future git will die and we will transition to the next big thing, and they will get it right that time.

There are many such things in the world of tech, and in most cases it is best to say “yes, it’s awful, but no, I can’t change it, and rather than expending energy on hating it (which is totally justifiable) I will expend the energy on minimising its damaging impact to my productivity and focus on accelerating my work elsewhere.”

I say this because I have spent so many hours ranting about git and every time it gets in my way (git submodules anyone?) I used to get so stressed by its design that it would hurt my productivity.

Be the Zen Dev: acknowledge it, isolate it, keep it at arms length.

Tips: Make a cheat sheet, use a minimal feature set, don’t try to do anything clever with it, and always have a way out (eg backups! Take copies of your directory before dealing with lesser know commands! Try things out on dummy repo’s before breaking your own, etc.).