Comments on: Git and command-line fear

By: semazen

semazen — Tue, 24 Aug 2010 22:57:28 +0000

is, but specific applications can handle it how they like. Vim does it pretty decently, for example.

Same goes for completion. You can get completion scripts for

By: semazen gösterisi

semazen gösterisi — Tue, 24 Aug 2010 22:56:45 +0000

is, but specific applications can handle it how they like. Vim does it pretty decently, for example.

Same goes for completion. You can get completion scripts for

By: James Gregory

James Gregory — Mon, 17 Aug 2009 13:15:44 +0000

George: Nice generalisations.

Cut and paste from the raw command-line is crap, yes, but specific applications can handle it how they like. Vim does it pretty decently, for example.

Same goes for completion. You can get completion scripts for bash that enable autocomplete for git, and it already has built in filename completion.

I’d suggest trying a command-line other than cmd.exe.

By: George Mauer

George Mauer — Mon, 17 Aug 2009 13:07:55 +0000

I will gladly use command-line all the time for everything once it has

1) Regular cut and paste like all other applicaitons
2) Some sort of intellisense to increase discoverability.

Simply put, the usability story for every command-line utility ever is a nightmare.

By: Kenneth Dalgleish

Kenneth Dalgleish — Tue, 04 Aug 2009 23:38:56 +0000

What’s wrong with git-gui and gitk included in the install? I have been working with git on windows for some years now, first Cygwin and then Msysgit. I rely heavily on git.gui and gitk, and only use command-line for certain operations, like rebase. Some advanced stuff, like cherry-picking or partial commits ++, is a breeze in the gui. And all the regular stuff is there, easily accessible, like branch management, push, pull, commit, merge, file-staging and so on.

By: Bill Barry

Bill Barry — Mon, 27 Jul 2009 13:46:06 +0000

Another reason people might say that is because they haven’t looked in the past year or so. MsysGit is pretty good, but it hasn’t been for very long. When I went looking for a DVCS, windows Git support consisted of: install cygwin; use git there. That is poor windows support (it would be like saying that Office 2003 runs in Linux because it works fine under Wine).

From a Windows perspective 2 years ago, Git wasn’t an option.

This isn’t a good excuse for ignoring Git now (though I still feel that Mercurial is a better choice).

By: Brian Mavity

Brian Mavity — Sat, 25 Jul 2009 05:52:02 +0000

While I agree that having some familiarity with the command line is essential for software developers, I feel that memorizing a ton of arcane commands is a waste of my mental energies. I can use git on windows (and do), but let’s face it, the command line sucks. Someday soon, someone will come out with a git UI that has a UX designed for human beings and we will stop having to suffer through the crap we have now. Unfortunately, I haven’t seen anything reasonable (including tortoise git and git extensions which are both decent but still very deficient)

By: Sasa Brankovic

Sasa Brankovic — Fri, 24 Jul 2009 09:12:58 +0000

I’m a GIT fan myself, but using GIT on Windows is a bit of pain (and so is using Windows, now I think of it). The “problem” here is that command line usually IS the fastest of getting things done, but only once you master it. It takes time and effort to master something, and for many developers spoiled by years of using Microsoft’s shiny IDE, this seems to be a problem.

By: Anne Epstein

Anne Epstein — Tue, 21 Jul 2009 23:51:45 +0000

At my last shop, we used SVN, and it wasn’t only the developers checking stuff in-it was also the HTML coders, and sometimes even the graphics designers. Maybe that sounds like a mess, but it worked well- it was a web shop, there was a lot of static content, and Tortoise SVN suited our needs well. For that group, having a decent GUI was useful, and maybe necessary-perhaps command-line comfort should be expected of programmers, but should it be expected of everyone else? Real question… we decided that it was borderline unreasonable and decided to go with the source control with the best GUI at the time. If we only had programmers to consider, we might have made a different choice.

By: Paul Batum

Paul Batum — Tue, 21 Jul 2009 23:09:19 +0000

James, you know I’m a git fan, but I DO think it still has tooling problems on Windows. The default behavior for diffs, merges and blames are all painful, and I still haven’t managed to figure out how to get git to use my external tools (such as p4merge) in every case.