1. The guide is intended for people who want to take a look "under the hood". This is really difficult to do through GUIs, which tend to hide all of the implementation details.
2. As a child comment mentioned, even if I include GUIs in the guide, I can't possibly cover all of them. This just confuses things for people who use GUI X when the guide only talks about GUI Y and Z.
3. It's much easier to write the guide using CLI examples. I wrote this over the weekend; I don't think I would have completed anywhere near as much of it if I had to keep taking screenshots, cropping them, uploading them, etc.
Besides, there are already plenty of other guides that talk about "how to use Git", "how to use GUI X to do Git feature Y". I wouldn't want to detract from the main goal of this guide which is to give people who are already comfortable with Git that extra push to "get" how Git models and interacts with your repository.
But, git's natural habitat is the CLI, git was designed with and for the command line. There are no GUIs (yet) for git that expose git's full power, and I wish there were.
And there are no GUIs (yet) that actually make git easier to understand (as opposed to making some known git workflows less labor intensive) -- I also hope for this in the future, but it will require a more fundamental redesign of git's interface and terminology.
Adding menu options with the names of things git does makes git slightly more discoverable, but not much easier to understand. For better or worse, I think understanding git from the command line point of view is (currently) critical to a deep understanding of git, even if you're using a git GUI.
I heavily disagree with this.
When I started heavy use of git branches, being able to actually visualize what a branch is (e.g. just a pointed, as the article points out), being able to actually see the various branches merging into each other, it all just made my life easier.
When I used to explain git to our new employees, it was in the CLI, but I quickly moved to explaining it GUI-first because I could teach all the concepts much more quickly and they clearly understood better that way.
Its a fair point that visualizing branches makes a big difference to people learning git. One reason that all git intro articles have these A->B->C diagrams.
FYI, the git CLI can give you branch visuals, e.g., 'git log --graph'. I was honestly thinking beyond basic branching when I wrote the above, but its worth remembering that the basics matter, and I also wouldn't even disagree with someone who claimed a GUI branch graph is easier to look at than a CLI branch graph, even though there may be no informational difference.
Still, I think the larger points I was trying to make stand:
- There is no git GUI that can replace the git CLI. There are many GUIs that give you pieces of git's workflow, but none complete enough to be a true one-stop-git-shop -- especially when it comes to more advanced workflows & repo administration.
- Git was not designed for a GUI, it was designed for a command line, and it shows in many ways. The CLI is the only place you can use all of git's power and understand all of git's features. It's also, as wildlyinaccurate was trying to explain, the lowest common denominator interface, hence the easiest to start basic explanations with. All people who have git have a CLI interface. Written with any GUI in mind, and a git tutorial immediately loses the majority of its potential audience.
But I would point out that the "advanced" functionality of git that you're talking about is something 99.9% of people will never use. Hell, even branches is something that most people don't use.
1) Sometimes the GUI illuminates and the console obfuscates. Logs and history are a lot easier for developers to understand in my experience from a GUI.
2) I'd suggest only using the included GIT GUI that comes with the download from git-scm.com. It is simple enough that it should map easily to another GUI, plus if they aren't using an embedded git everyone should already have it installed.
I agree that a GUI can make some tasks a lot simpler but, personally, I've always found that teaching people to use any DVCS from the ground up (i.e. from the command line) ends up with a greater level of understanding. Once you've got that, you can move on to using a GUI to improve your workflow, but with the understanding of exactly what is being abstracted away.
In any case, I'm quite sceptical of the claim that you can teach Git more effectively through the command line alone. Here's why: the two most important concepts to understand before you can properly grok DVCS are (a) that your source history is a key integral part of your workflow and not just a sideshow, and (b) how revisions, changesets and merges relate to each other through the DAG. GUI tools do this very effectively by putting your source history, complete with a graphical view of your revisions, right at the front of your workflow. By contrast, the command line requires you to type git log --graph, effectively relegating it to a sideshow like in the bad old days of Subversion.
I can't help getting the impression that learning DVCS through the command line risks you ending up with an understanding of the subject that is fundamentally flawed. You see this in virtually every Git versus Mercurial debate that focuses on which one is better at branching and merging. Most of the arguments that I've seen leave me with the impression that the people who are making them haven't a clue what they're talking about.
There are many, many people who have no problems with using the command line, and who in fact by default prefer it to GUI tools. The guide itself provides graphs and visual means of understanding, and explains how these representations relate to the CLI tools. Very helpful!
I don't really agree with your complaint, because it seems like you're just saying "I would prefer to read a different kind of article," which is fine, but it's not a criticism. The argument about "alienating an even larger portion of your reader base" seems spurious; the author can write to whatever target audience they want!
But the fact of the matter is that the Git community is churning out articles such as this one left, right and centre, while ones at a more readily accessible level are being neglected, and therein lies the problem. While there are many, many people who do not have any problems with the command line tools, there are also many, many people who do -- especially in the Windows and .NET world. The fact that we have a glut of command-line focused low-level Git tutorials and a dearth of more readily accessible ones, combined with the common attitude in the Gitosphere of "if you're using GUI tools you're doing it wrong," paints a picture of Git to people such as these of an ecosystem that is elitist, arrogant and user-hostile.
It's nothing to do with the kind of article I'd like to read. It's everything to do with bad marketing.
It's command line, but it's interactive and visual.
Start off by typing the command `levels` into the prompt at the bottom left.
I mostly use the history view and the staging view (which lets you add/remove files). For complicated tasks the history view is a very valuable tool which I even use when I prefer to do something on the command line.
This is a shame because I personally found GUI front ends for Git and Mercurial critical to understanding how they work in the first place, and in fact some tasks (such as advanced branch manipulation or hunk selection as with git add -p) are considerably harder with the command line than with GUI tools, simply because the command line doesn't give you a full enough picture of what you're doing.