It frighten me how some contributor to my open source repo just don't care about their git history. They do 100 of "crap" commits (author's wording) and merge commits. Sometimes I'd write a comment like: "can you please rebase your branch" and even very senior software engineer are clueless and can't do it even if I give the exact git command i'd use. In the end it's simpler for me to do it myself.
Some developers don't even use git and just use some UI on top.
I wish GitHub would have an interface to do interactive rebase and edit commit messages.
I consider myself very knowledgeable on using Git even though I almost exclusively use it through GUI tools, however my particular GUI wrapper of choice, TortoiseGit on Windows is incredibly powerful. I very regularly do rebasing, squashing, use worktrees extensively, etc.
When I occasionally have to work on Linux or macOS for our Electron based cross platform product, I haven’t yet found a GUI tool I feel comes remotely close to TortoiseGit in terms of advanced features. So much so that if I need to do things like rebasing or dealing with slightly complicated merges, I push first to a branch and then do the Git work on my Windows machine.
I could work out all the Git command line arguments for these advanced use cases, but for something like rebasing with some squashing or skipping, I can’t see how anything except a well designed GUI could be anything except a seriously clunky and much slower experience.
My feeling is that (good) GUIs in general make a lot more sense for Git, instead of having to read the entire manual upfront to know the available tools, the GUI can show relevant options based on context and you don’t get bogged down having to type out/paste commit references and other things into your terminal.
I occasionally use the built in Git tools on VS Code and Visual Studio 2022 (the latter of which only in the last couple of years didn’t completely suck), but generally only for simple pulls, commits and pushes, which is generally more convenient in the IDE than having to switch to TortoiseGit.
Of course a tool is just a tool, if you don’t “get” how Git works, no tool will save you, but I do think TortoiseGit’s rebase UI helped me get to the point where Git “clicked” for me sooner.
> I could work out all the Git command line arguments for these advanced use cases, but for something like rebasing with some squashing or skipping, I can’t see how anything except a well designed GUI could be anything except a seriously clunky and much slower experience.
That’s just an interactive rebase; on the command line it opens a text editor. It’s pretty easy.
I have nothing against EMacs, but I’ve never used it and have no particular plans to do so while I spend the overwhelming majority of my time on Windows.
Some developers don't even use git and just use some UI on top.
I wish GitHub would have an interface to do interactive rebase and edit commit messages.