this post was submitted on 21 Mar 2025
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Just a heads up, it you don't know how to use cli git in 2025 you're probably a shit developer. There are undoubtedly exceptions, but I would argue not knowing version control intimately makes you a bad developer.
Why learn an archaic and honestly horrifying command line interface, possibly the worst CLI ever made in the history of computing...when nice normal graphical interfaces work better, have discoverability, have troubleshooting tools, and don't require memorizing scripture?
There's nothing 'archaic' about git's CLI. I think you might just be opposed to CLI's in general, which is fine for a regular computer user, but paints a grim picture of your competency if you're a developer.
That seems unnecessarily harsh.
I find the built in controls with visual studio supremely convenient.
After using git init --bare for the remote repo I use the built in git controls for branching and switching out as well as syncing and pushing. Why not, the button is right there and it's literally faster.
The difference is that PRESUMABLY you aren't utterly dependent upon it. If vscode utterly fucks your repo with a shit command, you'll not really have any trouble fixing it. That's the huge difference. The point is not that all GUI controls are always bad all of the time, the point is that you need to know what the hell you are doing in git as a basic tenant of developer competency.
Mate... Theres maybe like 5 "git + singleword" commands that cover 99.999% of all of your uses of git. Its really not hard.
Because they are universally incapable of coming anywhere close to the full power of git.
I can't tell you how many times I've had GUI-only people ask me to unfuck their repo (fortunately not at my current job, because everyone uses the CLI and actually knows what they're doing). It's an impedance to actually learning the tool.
Ultimately any GUI is a poor, leaky abstraction over git that restricts many of the things you can do for little actual benefit.
Most cli stuff is a lot easier than programming. If you can't use cli then by definition you're a shit programmer.
Of course if you simply don't want to use cli that's a different matter.
Why learn a GUI that can change from release to release when I can learn a CLI once and be done with it. An additional plus is that CLIs are easier to script and automate.
As someone using git for the last 10 years by now: you're wrong. No UI has managed to give me access to all the fuckery I often do very quickly on the command line. I was honestly surprised to see IntelliJ nowadays supports an interactive rebase, but reflog, which should be a basic git feature, is still not widely supported in most IDEs in 2025. Or adding, resetting or checking out files with regex. Setting up and modifying lfs. And these are all basic features, good luck doing something like using branch~n syntax for some of the operations etc.
Git UI is shit and will be for a long time.
The fact that you don't already know why and are dependent on GUI tools that you don't fully understand is the reason that you're probably not a very good developer.
Git is incredibly powerful. Knowing why and how is infinitely valuable. Nothing about git cli is archaic or even particularly difficult to understand. Also the man page is very excellent.
Ah, the no true Scotsman fallacy. Neat.
Your lack of rational thought backed up by facts rather than feelings is why you're a bad developer.
See I can do it too.
But honestly even saying "nothing about the git cli is archaic" is...well, it's either disqualifying or Stockholm syndrome, and Stockholm syndrome isn't real.
I said that you are probably not very good. Your lack of git knowledge and your seeming inability to learn git means that you'll likely never be able to function effectively in a development team and will only succeed in holding everyone back. Your lack of knowledge of version control overall is a massive point against you from the outset.
If you're a solo developer and never need to collaborate with other developers then good for you, but you lack of version control knowledge means that you'll also probably end up being one of the ones crying that you lost 6 months of work because of stupid reason x y or z.
Read up on fallacies, I did not use one. Your pathetic attempt to shoehorn anything that I said into a no true Scotsman fallacy just shows that you also have poor communication skills.
Holy fucking shit. I didn't even catch the bit at the end. You really think that cli arguments are archaic??? I'm going to go ahead and assume that regex has you scared shitless as well. Fuck me, you are not a good developer.
Sidenote, something that will help you understand regex and you can test your strings against it in realtime, look up https://regexr.com/