Git undo: We can do better

Re:Git undo: We can do better by dragonwriter on Monday June 21, 2021 @12:24PM (#27580726)

> Not a single person I’ve met using git in the last decade has thrived using a UI for it.

I do most of my git through one or another UI (right now, mainly the integrated functionality in VSCode, a gitflow workflow extension for VSCode, and repository history graph extension for VSCode that supports doing operations against branches/tags/commits from the graph.) I feel loke I’m thriving that way.

Its not a substitute for knowing git, though, and I think that people who lean on a UI as a substitute for knowing what is going on underneath rather than as a convenience layer are not likely to thrive.

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Re:Git undo: We can do better by oblio on Monday June 21, 2021 @12:23PM (#27580711)

That's a failing of Git. TortoiseSVN brought source control to millions of people. A good tool should be fully embeddable in a UI, 15 years after its launch.

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Re:Git undo: We can do better by approxim8ion on Monday June 21, 2021 @01:27PM (#27581392)

We still use tortoiseSVN at work. It's crude but shockingly simple to use. Moving to git would be a significant expense just to train people not to break things and to get them used to CLI.

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Re:Git undo: We can do better by somethingor on Monday June 21, 2021 @02:30PM (#27582191)

TortoiseGit exists too and is fantastic IMO: https://tortoisegit.org/

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Re:Git undo: We can do better by approxim8ion on Tuesday June 22, 2021 @06:13AM (#27589846)

Wish they put some screenshots on their site, but I'm glad it does if it does to git what it does to SVN!

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Re:Git undo: We can do better by pjmlp on Tuesday June 22, 2021 @02:18AM (#27588583)

Indeed, it makes using git so much less painfull.

There are days where I daydream of Clearcase when dealing with git.

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Re:Git undo: We can do better by atulatul on Tuesday June 22, 2021 @03:54AM (#27589091)

Early in my career- when I got evil twin error- I was conditioned not to daydream of clearcase ever. :)

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Re:Git undo: We can do better by pjmlp on Tuesday June 22, 2021 @07:05AM (#27590169)

On the positive side, messing up the view configurations doesn't wipe our files.

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Re:Git undo: We can do better by OJFord on Monday June 21, 2021 @05:54PM (#27585024)

Or a success of git? No good GUI exists because they realise they'd just be recreating things that exist, but with a GUI frame?

If you wrote git 2.whatever from scratch would you structure rhe commands a bit differently? Yeah, sure, probably; but I always think these threads are way overblown. The common stuff that you use frequently.. well you use it frequently, so either you remember it as a result or you use the alias feature so that you can. For the less common stuff.. if you have to look it up in the excellent documentation, is that a failing?

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Re:Git undo: We can do better by oblio on Tuesday June 22, 2021 @04:20AM (#27589247)

> if you have to look it up in the excellent documentation, is that a failing

Yes, if we ever want version control to become mainstream.

Version control is a very practical, day to day concept.

It's just almost unusable for regular folks.

And regular folks for sure won't use CLIs (unless you point a gun to their heads).

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Re:Git undo: We can do better by OJFord on Tuesday June 22, 2021 @05:42AM (#27589662)

Version control is mainstream; git isn't, and isn't trying to be? Git is version control for plaintext files, (yes yes I know LFS exists) primarily software, and used by people who like using CLIs and have all kinds of other CLI tools for it to interface with.

Who's trying to make 'regular folks' use git, with or without a gun?

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Re:Git undo: We can do better by dividedbyzero on Tuesday June 22, 2021 @07:20AM (#27590270)

> Who's trying to make 'regular folks' use git, with or without a gun?

I would have loved to have that option quite a few times. Lots of projects that involve software, but also get contributions from non-developers, or need almost no user-facing config, but not exactly zero. If git wasn't so hostile, quite a few tiny config web UIs I've built over the years could have been SublimeText or the like and a very userfriendly git client. It's kind of frustrating to have a repository with a directory full of .sql files, a CI pipeline that versions and verifies those and deploys the updated app, but the domain expert who is perfectly capable of writing the SQL still needs me to put the file in the right place and commit+push it, because they (understandably) just won't use git on Windows.

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Re:Git undo: We can do better by OJFord on Tuesday June 22, 2021 @08:29AM (#27590810)

> they (understandably) just won't use git on Windows.

I'm not sure how understandable that is, especially in the age of WSL - but I just won't use Windows so what do I know :)

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Re:Git undo: We can do better by lanstin on Monday June 21, 2021 @02:14PM (#27581957)

magit (for emacs) is quite good. But I still only use it for browsing around mostly, or single-file commits. For serious work, I start with git status, and then git diff all the changes, and then group them and then commit then in groups, then pull --rebase then push HEAD:good_branch_name (by the time I've done all the above, I have a better chance at a good name than I do for the first commit). Then over to PR land, where we have "ff if possible and delete source branch."

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Re:Git undo: We can do better by animal_spirits on Monday June 21, 2021 @12:23PM (#27580709)

I've said this in other threads but I'll proselytize here as well. I really started to grok git after using the lazygit terminal UI. I think it's really handy to see what the current "state" of git is in and how to browse it easily. Would continue to recommend.

https://github.com/jesseduffield/lazygit

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