This makes a lot more sense when you realise that Linus thought he was building a low level tool that people would build a UI on top of. The 'original' git command line was more a proof of concept and engineering tool than something aimed at actual use.

Right, doing a search through the git mailing list for the use of the word "porcelain" is fascinating. It's unfortunate some of those "porcelain" projects never finished.

... because none of the power users used them.

Heh. I think Linux on desktop it is like that, at least a bit; frequently, by the time someone could write a friendly GUI (or friendly CLI for that matter), they have little use for it.

That's a disturbingly insightful parable for everything from startups to linux/FOSS contributions.

I don't think it was ever really intended for worldwide use by Linus, it was intended to exactly replicate his workflow and his alone. The real responsible party is github; I'm not sure how they came to dominate?

By being much, much, much better than the competition at the time (sourceforge) - github was faster, without ads, used superior vcs. Github also had Octopuss/Octocat as a logo :-) .

Sure, but why github rather than mercurialhub etc? The website has great usability but the git CLI does not. Maybe the github gui was also critical.

Yes, the gui was good (and it still is, or may be I am too familiar with it at this point, I do not know).

Another factor is that git was always FAST, and the most common operations (init, log, status, commit, checkout, push, pull) are not that complicated as people make them to be, so you can very easily start to use it for new local projects, and continue without installing additional plugins, unlike mercurial ... And at some point, when you wanted a colaboration hub or just a public remote repo, you just pushed your code to github.

> Git [...] feels like the designer [...] said "F*ck this shit, make your own UI on top if you want to use this tool!"

Actually this is exactly what happened back then, which is why many people used https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cogito_(software) as a frontend to git in the early days. That said, I personally find current git UX absolutely fine and I can't imagine being effective without having all those commands like git reset --whatever -p and git rebase --interactive.

What an absurd statement: "Torvalds has a proper excuse for the pain and suffering he's inflicted on millions of developers worldwide :(" !

Who are you exactly to judge people like that, oh failed incarnation of a tibetan Lama ???

He does not need an excuse to make a tool that has proven very useful to many (including me). In fact, I am grateful, that he chose to make it and publish it.

It definitely feels like it was written by someone used to writing an ABI or library rather than a set of command line tools.

Certain tools are organized by what code goes together rather than by what user functions make sense to go together. It's part of what makes it confusing.