Beej's Guide to Git

I can't help but feel that Git has completely missed the forest through the trees that you can make a 30+ part guide explaining how to use it.

My sense, bluntly, is that if people spent half the effort learning git that they do whining about it, no one would bother making a 30+ part guide just explaining stuff you could find in a man page.

Commits are snapshots of a tree. They have a list of ancestors (usually, but not always, just one). Tags are named pointers to a commit that don't change. Branches are named pointers to a commit that do change. The index is a tiny proto-commit still in progress that you "add" to before committing.

There. That's git. Want to know more? Don't read the guide, just google "how to I switch to a specific git commit without affecting my tree?", or "how do I commit only some of my changed files?", or "how to I copy this commit from another place into my current tree?".

The base abstractions are minimalist and easy. The things you want to do with them are elaborate and complicated. Learn the former, google the latter. Don't read guides.

Sigh. Another git thread, another pile of posts telling me that if I would _just do the work_ to understand the underlying data structure I could finally allow myself to be swept up in the _overwhelming beauty_ of the something something something.

The evidence that the git UI is awful is _overwhelming_. Yes, yes, I’m sure the people that defend it are very very very very smart, and don’t own a TV, and only listen to albums of Halloween sounds from the 1950s and are happy to type the word “shrug“ and go on to tell us how they’ve always found git transparent and easy. The fact is that brilliant people struggle with git every single day, and would almost certainly be better served by something that makes more sense.

GP isn't describing the underlying data structures, they're describing the basic interface of commits, branches, and tags. The 101 stuff you have to learn regardless, for any version control, not just git. Dismissing it like this just sounds like someone who refuses to hold scissors by the handles.