Git making me want to pull my hair out yet again

&quot;Git making me want to pull my hair out yet again. One of the most unintuitive, clunky <i>interfaces</i> of any software I&#x27;ve ever used.&quot; Emphasis mine.<p>The link has a bad title.<p>The CTO&#x27;s problem isn&#x27;t Git. It&#x27;s the design of the Git CLI commands.<p>Which, to be frank, I think is pretty reasonable.<p>Git as a version control system is great, but it desperately needs an &quot;apt style&quot; revamp.

It is unintuitive and crappy in places (anyone who claims otherwise is out of their mind).<p>No one, I repeat no one, wants to consider VCS operations as graph operations. We endure it because it gets the job done.<p>The fact that “mine” and “theirs” is reversed for merge and rebase doesn’t even make sense <i>after the explanation is made</i>. There are dozens of examples like this.<p>And the worst wart of all in my opinion is that it’s designed around posix, even “mostly” expecting to be run in a posix shell. I guess I can forgive that (seeing as it was created by a Linux person) but I’m not interested in running git-bash or similar on windows, meaning it’s a pretty degraded experience. Making aliases under windows cmd&#x2F;PS is… interesting.<p>Git served us well but I hope it is soon displaced by something else. We can do better.

I&#x27;ve been using git professionally for about 11 years. I&#x27;ve taught entire teams to use git.<p>I don&#x27;t disagree with him. Git isn&#x27;t user friendly and its non obvious how to do a lot of things you&#x27;d expect to be trivial in your workflow.

I&#x27;m not saying Git isn&#x27;t complex, but this is the same guy everyone was lauding a couple of weeks ago for saying C&#x2F;C++ should be deprecated in favor of Rust.<p>Git is fine and so are C&#x2F;C++ thank you.

TortoiseGit + IDE tooling, CLI only for edge cases not taken by the IDE, when the repo gets borked, rename it, git clone, copy the latest changes on the freshly cloned repo.<p>No need to care more than that, I never needed a PhD in SCM systems since the RCS days and ain&#x27;t starting now.

After a decade of having to craft precisely my commits, manually syncing, choosing between easy merge and clean history, and using tons of additional tools to make git bearable, I&#x27;m finally tired enough to give a try to fossil.

The CLI interface is very good at enforcing you to be aware of the underlying model (local state and the repo’s history). This allows for the user to draw an accurate user-model in his understanding of the system.<p>I have been using Git for around 15 years, without a fuss. Maybe because I was lucky enough to have found a good tutorial.<p>Instead of hiding the abstractions behind a “friendlier” CLI, Git shows you its real power and that of VCSs in general, by having a lower-level API.<p>Not even the multiple GUIs built on top of Git, adventure themselves into hiding or dumbing down the abstractions that allow you to do quite complex things with the code and its history.

While I can navigate the Git CLI really easily these days, I don&#x27;t disagree with Mark. Outside of the big four (&quot;git clone&quot;, &quot;git rebase&quot;, &quot;git commit&quot;, &quot;git push&quot;), you&#x27;re almost certainly engaging in some serious black magic fuckery. Hell, even &quot;git rebase&quot; straddles the fuckery border, especially when you&#x27;re doing fix-up commits between commits.<p>If Git makes Russinovich want to shoot his computer, then a revamp of the CLI is _definitely_ in order.<p>Won&#x27;t be surprised if GitHub goes for it by extending their awesome `gh` tool.

We can do better with version control for sure. Git hands down, even for some experienced developers, causes consternation whenever you have to go off the beaten path. Committing, merging, rebasing (in the happy path) and a few others are not so bad. Everything else starts getting more difficult, especially because the mental model of git is not intuitive.<p>I don&#x27;t personally run into problems, but I&#x27;ve sure seen many, many other people struggle learning and using the git cli.

He&#x27;s so right about this. git is terrible. I hope some day we see a successful successor.

Wonder what he worked with before that was better. Maybe Visual SourceSafe? :)

I have been using git for almost a decade, I don’t see any issues and I enjoy it quite a lot. Is there something I am not aware of?

I guess the problem is people diving in to daily use of git without first educating themselves about how it works. In fact git is elegant and wonderfully designed, which makes it easy to use. It’s hard not to descend into a bit of snarkiness and say it&#x27;s less than astonishing to see this from a Microsoft guy.

“CTO of Azure not using Magit”

I have been using Git since college and for a few years since I began my job, can&#x27;t say I have had any problem that I couldn&#x27;t find a solution for oneline. Plus, I use Github Desktop now, so I do not have to worry about the pesky commands as much as I would have earlier.

Git is a big step up from older code versions management tools and there is nothing particularly bad or difficult about its interface so I don&#x27;t get the hate.<p>I suppose that once you become the standard you become a target as Microsoft knows very well.

Can&#x27;t be he&#x27;s using it wrong.

Windows GUI people dislike Git, news at 11:)<p>I have gotten used to git, and it is fine, I do like gnupg signing on commits.<p>The only thing I miss is &quot;$Id$&quot; that CVS&#x2F;RCS would update with the rev. I could then print out the rev so I could see what version of the object is on one of the many servers at work. I wish git has something similar.

Whenever I hear someone making a broad hyperbolic politic rant about a technology which is otherwise used successfully by hundreds of thousands of people, I like to ask - what specifically is the problem you&#x27;re running into? Usually it reveals a lot more about the person than the technology.

this is nothing more than a shot across the bow. you can&#x27;t build an argument for why everyone should move away from git, unless you can point back to a tweet from a few years ago that you can say &quot;i&#x27;ve been saying this for years&quot; about. what better way to get an entire industry to move to your product, than to acquire its main &quot;hub&quot; and then replace the underlying tech. customer adoption strategy at its finest. as they have sunset atom ... next they&#x27;ll sunset vs code and make you use straight up vs ... and they&#x27;ll sunset typescript ... because ... this is conceptually just c# nowdays.

I work at a megacorp. We asked to pay Git folks to support monorepo sparse checkouts. They refused. Lo and behold Microsoft enters the ring, hires a Git committer to do it, and now it has it. Instead, we forked Mercurial, and got rid of staging and branching. Straight-line development is the way to go for most monorepos. Feature branches create a big mess. You also need sparse file systems for large mono repos otherwise the storage and network requirements exceed what is reasonable.<p>In addition, it&#x27;s imperative pushes default to running server-side sanity lints (with break-glass bypass) before accepting commits. This means either disallow pushes to production repos with a CI&#x2F;CD stage + code review in-between or have some sort of proof-of-work hooks that accept local testing results.<p>GPG has the same problem: powerful but the UX is a hot mess.

Why not just say &quot;Mark Russinovich&quot; instead of the current title? Unless there&#x27;s some agenda behind it. Mark is pretty famous among tech circles.

I had a couple of colleagues complaining about Git, so I asked what was the problem. &quot;Hard to use&quot;, &quot;commands doesn&#x27;t makes sense&quot; was among the answers.<p>Two hours on a whiteboard explaining how Git works in a little more detail and now the complaints are gone.<p>The gist of my anecdote is; learn your tools properly, not only does it save you headache but also makes you more productive.<p>(It&#x27;s a bit dated, but Pro Git by Strauss is an good book to get a better understanding of Git)

So many tweets with no report of the problem at hand.

He is not wrong.