If you later decide that the CLI is faster, go ahead. But first, people need to see visually how they can interact with the tree.
I like fork.dev, but most clients are pretty similar at this point.
I use Magit and doing things like "abort cherry-pick" is discoverable in the interface itself and uses the exact same shortcut as the other "abort X" operations. If I had to use the Git CLI, I'd have no idea where to start.
Similarly, I've made mistakes in interactive rebases where I deleted a commit that shouldn't have been deleted. If I recall correctly, the start of every rebase creates a snapshot that is accessible from the reflog, so this is a safe way to revert changes from a rebase gone wrong. Magit's UI for the reflog is exactly the same as the UI for the log, so I was not lost when I saw it for the first time. With the Git CLI, I'd likely have no clue what's going on.
It's really powerful because it gives you precisely that visual layout that shows you what's going on in the repository, and what you're doing right now.
It has generally worked better for me to use the same interface everyone else is using, even when that interface is awful, because that eases communication with the rest of the team. It also lets me take advantage of online troubleshooting resources, which all assume you are doing things the normal way.
to summarise: use the desktop apps now, but thou shalt need to learn the CLI.
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when i’ve taught absolute development beginners how to use git and how to do PRs i show them both the CLI and GitHub desktop. not every single thing. but i at least show them add/commit/push and creating/checking out branches in the CLI.
why?
1) this CLI thing is what power users / experienced folks use. this is your long term goal.
2) oh look, the terminal is typing things out instead of clicking on buttons which have slightly different names (target audience has never seen a terminal)
3a) some things cannot be unfucked in a desktop app. i don’t have to explain what the CLI is to show them how to unfuck it. i might have to remind them. but it’s not totally alien to them. they’re only seeing the fix for the first time, not the fix and the CLI.
3b) they might feel more comfortable trying to use the CLI when they’ve already been shown it before. ideally in tandem with 3a — “hey i need to do this thing to unfuck it, could you sit with me while i go through to avoid fucking it even more”
4) maybe they go “screw it, i want the pain because i really want to be a magician at this”. it’s nice for them to have the option of the easier, simpler path when they’re having a bad day with it.
ill always suggest that absolute beginners use the desktop apps because it does reduce early fuck ups. and part of that involves showing them the desktop apps.
but i feel they need to be made aware the desktop apps are not the be end and end all. they can try the CLI a few times if they want. at some point, they will have to use it.
they also need to learn to fuck it up. making mistakes is how human beings really learn.
both making mistakes and demo-ing the CLI early, often and safely; rather than later and rarely; gets people to “magician” level faster in my experience.
essentially, you have more to learn buddy. keep working on it if you want to be one of the magicians in the team. if you don’t, that’s fine. but at some point you’ll need to deal with this CLI thing.
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> people need to see visually how they can interact with the tree.
i’ve got a whole diagram thing i draw live showing them how everything is based on commits or a collection of commits, moving the commits around in front of them.
seems to be a better way to cover remotes, branches and eventually PRs than leaving them to work it out with some history visualisation which is usually a bit hard to read.
Interactive tutorial with tree visualization that has helped co-workers: https://learngitbranching.js.org/
i don’t think i’ve typed out a full hash in … years? if i have i’ve used the short 8 character hash.
git rev-parse might be something useful to have a look at, especially when combined with aliases.
1) all UIs are completely missing at least some of Git CLI's functionality (shoutout to git's most neglected feature, git notes)
2) all UIs have at least a couple git features so tucked away that you'll only find them if you know to look for them (git checkout -- path > temp_file is a common culprit here, but I've seen UIs that hide git ammend)
3) the average time for a UI-exclusive user to need my help for one of those two reasons was about a month.
The gripe I have is that unless you expose people to CLIs early on, they will just not learn how to use a CLI at all. Whenever something inevitably breaks badly due to GUIs abstracting away how git really works in favour of a nicer UX, they'll end up asking someone that know Git how to fix their mess. And then, it's too late - they already know how to be productive-ish with git and how to deliver something. They can't justify investing time into learning the CLI (especially if they're not that great with Powershell or UNIX shells) so they constantly keep leaning on a colleague instead of learning.
This is not an hypothetical scenario - this really happened regularly at a place I worked at. Innumerable internal training lessons on Git went wasted due to people forgetting everything immediately by using Fork instead of the shell, and then pestering a handful of senior devs. Once IT banned Fork people were forced to use the terminal more often, so they had to learn how to use git for good and actually retained that knowledge via muscle memory.
The adage I've learnt over the course of the years is that the majority of people will go to any length to avoid learning new stuff. It's mentally less tiring to either waste their time doing stuff in an unproductive way than learning new things. IMHO it's better to force people to learn stuff the "right way" early on than let them pick up bad habits and then having to correct them later.
[1]: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1838873/visualizing-bran...