1. Always use `git switch` instead of `git checkout`
2. Avoid `reset --hard` at all costs. So for the "accidentally committed something to master that should have been on a brand new branch" issue, I would do this instead:
# create a new branch from the current state of master
git branch some-new-branch-name
# switch to the previous commit
git switch -d HEAD~
# overwrite master branch to that commit instead
git switch -C master
# switch to the work branch you created
git switch some-new-branch-name
# your commit lives in this branch now :)
3. I'd apply the same to the `cherry-pick` version of "accidentally committed to the wrong branch":
git switch name-of-the-correct-branch
# grab the last commit to master
git cherry-pick master
# delete it from master
git switch -d master~
git switch -C master
4. And also to the "git-approved" way for "Fuck this noise, I give up.":
# get the lastest state of origin
git fetch origin
# reset tracked files
git restore -WS .
# delete untracked files and directories
git clean -d --force
# reset master to remote version
git switch -d origin/master
git switch -C master
# repeat for each borked branch
The disconnect between git's beautiful internal model of blobs, a tree of commits, and pointers to commits, and the command line interface is so wild. All of these recipes are unintuitive even if you have a firm grasp of git's model; you also need to know the quirks of the commands! To just look at the first one... wouldn't it be more intuitive for the command line interface to be:
# this command exists already;
$ git switch -c some-new-branch-name
# is there a command that simply moves a branch from one commit to another without changing anything else? It feels like it should be possible given how git works.
$ git move-branch master HEAD~
The real "internal model" of git contains much more data/moving parts.
There isn't one tree of commits, there are typically at least two: local and remote
Branches are not just pointers to commits, but also possibly related to pointers in the other tree via tracking.
Stash and index and the actual contents of the working directory are additional data that live outside the tree of commits. When op says "avoid git reset hard" it's because of how all these interact.
Files can be tracked, untracked and ignored not ignored. All four combinations are possible.
...and for a good reason that should be apparent to anyone who understands git's model (HEAD points to a ref in this case, so if you suddenly change what that ref points to without updating the working tree you create an inconsistency).
You can do that manually of course (with `git update-ref` or even a text editor), but then you get to clean up the mess yourself.
Do you react the same way when an OS prevents you from writing to a file with an exclusive lock placed on it? So much for "a file is simply a collection of data stored as a single object"...
If a git repo was purely a collection of meaningless pointers and graph nodes, git would be a graph manipulation utility, not a version control system. The fact that some of those pointers have a meaning is what makes it useful and it doesn't contradict the fact that what you're working on is still just a bunch of pointers and nodes.
Theoretically it could, but that would be a rather surprising side effect. You could also check the new revision out and leave HEAD intact. Which one of those outcomes you would expect and why?
"error: ref in use by higher layers" makes much more sense to me in this case.
If you buy the "git is just a tree of commits and pointers" mental model it's absolutely not a surprising side effect but would be the logical thing to expect. I moved a pointer to a commit around, why would that change where HEAD is pointed.
Turns out it's a tree of commits and pointers to within that tree and a master pointer that come in two versions: pointing towards the pointers or pointing towards the tree. And pointers behave very differently when the master pointer is pointing to them...
> I moved a pointer to a commit around, why would that change where HEAD is pointed.
...because HEAD points to what's checked out. This pointer does not just exist and hang around, it has its semantics. Not understanding that reveals flaws in your mental model.
Besides, the side affect you find "not surprising" here is... rewriting HEAD to change what it points to. Then you ask "why would that change where HEAD is pointed". Sounds like you may be confused. Are you forgetting that a ref may point not just to a commit, but also to another ref? This is the whole idea behind branches after all, having HEAD point to a ref is exactly what makes branches semantically different from tags - if you don't understand it then no wonder you're confused.
(protip: if you find git's "pointers to pointers" confusing, perhaps because in C a "pointer" and "pointer to pointer" are separate types that make multiple dereferencing steps explicit, think of them as symlinks instead and it should become clearer - that's in fact how symrefs used to be implemented in the past)
When a pointer is in use by higher layers, a good UI will prevent you from making direct changes underneath it unless you force it or go low-level enough for it to not matter. The only sin of git I can see here is that `git` command provides you both high-level and low-level interfaces to manipulate the data structure you're working on with no clear distinction for the user.
It doesn't seem surprising to me. It probably ought to print ought a warning that head has detached though, like some other commands already do. That error message on the other hand seems very unhelpful. It's lingo that only makes sense if you're neck deep in the plumbing.
There's no such message there, it was a description of a situation written by me and it doesn't even actually match the git's lingo. Should have made it clearer I guess.
It is surprising. You wanted to edit the value of `main` ref, yet suddenly you now edited `HEAD` too without meaning it. Bailing out and letting you actually decide whether you want to do it or not is the correct thing to do for a high-level command like `git branch` (alternatively it could ask you what to do interactively). If you don't want such safeguards and you know what you're doing, use `git update-ref` which will happily let you break whatever you want.
Actually, "git reset --soft" moves the current branch to another commit, without moving the index (aka staging area) along with it, whereas "git reset" (aka "git reset --mixed") moves the current branch AND the index to another commit. I really couldn't wrap my head around it before I had gone through "Reset demystified" [1] a couple times - it's not a quick read but I can strongly recommend it.
git reset only works if you're on the branch you want to move, which is why every one of these example flows has you create your new branch, then do the reset, then switch to the new branch, instead of just allowing you to move a branch you're not on.
> The disconnect between git's beautiful internal model of blobs, a tree of commits, and pointers to commits, and the command line interface is so wild
Something I heard somewhere that stuck with me: git is less less of a Version Control System, and more of a toolkit for assembling your own flavor of one.
> Something I heard somewhere that stuck with me: git is less less of a Version Control System, and more of a toolkit for assembling your own flavor of one.
That's how it is in principle, but it seems to me that there aren't that many different CLI "porcelains" in practice. Kind of like how Knuth figured people would essentially write their DSLs on top of plain TeX, not spend most of their time in giant macro packages like LaTeX.
> That's how it is in principle, but it seems to me that there aren't that many different CLI "porcelains" in practice.
I think that's because most of the people that make custom tooling to support particular workflows build it into graphical (including IDE extensions, web-based. etc.) frontends, not CLIs.
Indeed, as with all of these examples exceptions will apply and, it's a good idea to check the log before taking any such action. I believe your example also depends on exactly how many commits you've made that need to be moved. In any case, it depends on me remembering exactly what `~` signifies.
Another vote for jujutsu. No one else needs to know you're using it. You can think of it as just a different CLI for git (although you shouldn't mix them). I used to use third-party interfaces like lazygit, but I don't need them anymore because jujutsu _just makes sense_.
Seconded jujutsu. It's 100% git-compatible and one of those rare birds that is both more powerful and simpler to use in practice due to rethinking some of the core ideas.
The "move a branch" command is `git push .`. Yes, you can push to the current repo. I have a script called git-update-branch which just does some preflight checks and then runs `git push --no-verify . +$branch@{upstream}:$branch` to reset a branch back to its upstream version.
> is there a command that simply moves a branch from one commit to another without changing anything else? It feels like it should be possible given how git works.
Not trying to defend the choice of `git checkout` over `git switch` (and `git restore`) but they were introduced in v2.23 of Git [0], which was released about 5 years ago [1]. If you take a look at their help pages, they still include a warning that says
> THIS COMMAND IS EXPERIMENTAL. THE BEHAVIOR MAY CHANGE.
Granted, it has been in there for basically as long as the command(s) existed [2] and after 5 years perhaps it might be time to no longer call it experimental.
Still, it does seem like `git checkout` might be a bit more backwards compatible (and also reflective of the time when this website was originally created).
5. Teaching `git add .` as default to add changes to the staging area is not ideal. Show adding specific files instead has less room for subsequent "oh shit" and better.
Learning about the `-p` option for `git add` was one of two things that revolutionized my Git usage. (The other was figuring out how to write effective commit messages.)
True enough, but it does make for good practice with the index and splitting workflows later on when you need to clean it up.
I think there's space for "git add ." as a didactic step. It maps cleanly to the most obvious way to understand a commit, as "here's what I've done". Bootstrapping from that to an understanding of "commits as communication with other developers" will naturally happen over time.
Is not very compatible with printlog-debugging. I'd rather encourage devs to prod around as they go if it benefits them, which causes grief for either them or reviewers in the end if they've internalized what you just said.
Explicitly adding internalizes a personal review process as inherent part of the push process, instead of something you attempt to force on top later.
It's better with a collaboration workflow that limits the span of time with expected discipline, imo.
Not comment OP, but checkout has two very different uses merged into one: restoring files and switching branches. To not break compatibility, git has now switch and restore commands that make commands more readable and understandable.
You should avoid reset --hard because it will delete all your uncommited, and you could end up in situations where that's really bad. Using reset --keep will keep uncommited changes, and failing if any uncommited change cannot be kept.
What do you mean avoid "reset --hard"? Why or why is it not enough in practice? I use it quite often, along with "alias git-restore-file='git restore --source=HEAD --'". It seems to work.
Rewriting these for jj users. I'm prefering long option names and full command names for clarity here, but all the commands have shortened aliases and all the option names have single-letter alternatives. `@` means "the current revision", `x+` means "the revision just after `x`", `x-` means "the revision just before `x`".
2. "Accidentally committed something to master that should have been on a brand new branch".
This doesn't really have an analogue. Branches ("bookmarks") only move when you tell them to. If you make a new commit on top of master, it doesn't point master to it, it just lives one past the tip of master. But let's say you accidentally moved master to include the new commit you shouldn't have:
# set master to the previous commit (and reaffirm that
# you're okay moving a bookmark backward)
$ jj bookmark set master --allow-backwards --revision @-
# there is no step two, you're still editing the change you already were
3. Move a commit from one branch to another.
# move the revision one-past-master on to our desired bookmark
$ jj rebase --revision master+ --destination name-of-the-correct-bookmark
# there is also no step two; technically we're not updating the bookmark
# to point to the new commit yet, but this isn't something you'd do as rote
# habit in jujutsu anyway
4. Fuck this noise, I give up:
# list all the operations I've performed against the repo
$ jj op log
# restore to some previous known-good state
$ jj op restore {id}
Bonus content, translated from the article:
> Oh shit, I committed and immediately realized I need to make one small change!
# move the current edits into the previous revision
$ jj squash
> Oh shit, I need to change the message on my last commit!
# re-describe the previous revision
$ jj describe --revision @-
> Oh shit, I tried to run a diff but nothing happened?!
# there is no staging area, all your changes are part of the repo and there is no
# staging area pseudo-commit; please understand that this still works elegantly
# with "patch-add" workflows and does not imply that large change sets can't be
# easily broken up into small commits
> Oh shit, I need to undo a commit from like 5 commits ago!
# find the commit
$ jj log
# back it out
$ jj backout {id}
> Oh shit, I need to undo my changes to a file!
# find the commit
$ jj log
# restore the paths provided to their contents in the given revision
$ jj restore --from {id} [paths...]
And finally there are a few things that are super easy/obvious in jujutsu that are far more annoying in git.
> Oh shit, I committed and many commits later realized I need to make one small change!
# moves the changes in the current working copy into the revision provided
$ jj squash --into {id}
> Oh shit, I committed and many commits later realized I need to make extensive changes!
# sets your working copy to the commit provided; later commits will be
# auto-rebased on top live as you make modifications
$ jj edit {id}
> Oh shit, I need to reorder two commits!
# does what it says on the tin
$ jj rebase --revision {a} --insert-before {b}
> Oh shit, I haven't committed anything in hours but I need something from an interim change from like thirty minutes ago
# look in the "obsolete log" for earlier iterations of the current revision
$ jj obslog
# restore the contents
$ jj restore --from {id} [paths...]
> Oh shit, I made a bunch of changes but want them to be in multiple commits (e.g., patch-add workflow)
# choose the parts to move out; you'll end up with two revisions, one with each half
$ jj split
> Oh shit, I need to break out a change from my current work into a new branch off master
# choose the parts to move out; you'll end up with two revisions, one with each half
$ jj split
# move the stuff I pulled out onto master
$ jj rebase --revision @- --destination master
# optional: name it; most of the time you wouldn't bother
$ jj bookmark create new-name --revision master+
> Oh shit, I need to make three sequential changes but roll them out one-by-one. I also might need to make fixes to previous ones before later ones are rolled out.
# author a new change on top of master and name it a
$ jj new master
…
$ jj bookmark create a
# author a new change on top of a and name it b
$ jj new
…
$ jj bookmark create b
# author a new change on top of b and name it c
$ jj new
…
$ jj bookmark create c
# edit a; nothing else is necessary to ensure b and c remain as descendants of
# revision a
jj edit a
…
# author a new change as part of b; nothing else is necessary to ensure c remains
# up to date on top of b
$ jj new --insert-before c
…
# point c at the new change
$ jj bookmark set b
One thing I really appreciate is that you can run `jj new master` at _any_ time to drop what you're doing and start a new change. The way jj handles the working copy, conflicts, and visible heads means there's just no need to think about uncommitted changes, unfinished conflict resolution, detached head, etc.. So many things that would get in your way just can't happen.
I haven’t thought about it at all but you’re right. It’s surprising how nice it is that I can enter a repo and `jj new main` without needing to remember any context whatsoever.
My post was a pretty naked attempt to showcase how much less convoluted basic operations are in jj vs. git and hopefully drum up some interest. Hopefully someone bites.
It is! I've fully migrated my repos over to `main` at this point so it's rare I have to think about the difference. You could also make an alias to `jj n` or something to make it even easier.
> 1. Always use `git switch` instead of `git checkout`
Even harder: always use "git reset --hard".
Basically don't use local branches. The correct workflow for almost every task these days is "all branches are remote". Fetch from remotes. Reset to whatever remote branch you want to work above. Do your work. Push back to a remote branch (usually a pull request branch in common usage) when you're done.
If you need to manage local state, do it manually with tags (or stash, but IMHO I never remember what I stashed and will always make a dummy commit and tag it).
Don't ever try to manually manage a branch locally unless you (1) absolutely have to and (2) absolutely know what you're doing. And even then, don't, just use a hosted upstream like github or whatever.
And that sounds like you failed to understand me. I didn't say "don't use branches". I said "all branches are remote". Pushing to a branch is communication with other human beings. Mixing your own private state into that is confusing and needless in 99% of situations (and the remaining 1% is isomorphic to "you're a maintainer curating branches for pushing to other people at a well-known location").
What actual problem does this solve? For me, WIP branches only ever get pushed up if at least one of two things are true about them:
1) They're actually worth preserving, and not some experimental garbage that ended up being totally pointless.
2) I need to get them off of my local machine for disaster-recovery purposes.
> If you need to manage local state, do it manually with tags (or stash, but IMHO I never remember what I stashed and will always make a dummy commit and tag it).
I don't see the benefit one gets from putting work that's not fit for publication in a dummy commit on a public branch. That's just asking for garbage that noone should concern themselves with to accidentally get pushed up at the end of a long-ass day.
> 1) They're actually worth preserving, and not some experimental garbage that ended up being totally pointless.
That seems naive. You don't know what's pointless for years, usually. Can I tell you how many times I've gone back to stale pull requests and topic branches to recover "How did I do this?" code?
> 2) I need to get them off of my local machine for disaster-recovery purposes.
That's called a "backup", and yes, data robustness is a big advantage of this workflow. You're acting like this is some kind of rare event. I push my local work to a branch (or three) on github every hour!
A corrolary is hardware independence, btw. Working off remote branches means I can also stand up a replacement development environment with a simple clone. (And the corrolary to that means that I can trivially document this such that other people can stand up development environments for my stuff, too!)
This is a workflow I’ve never seen on any team or project I’ve worked on. Another commenter already mentioned the remote branch for everything preference, but usage of tags is especially interesting to me. I think that’s how most people use branches, and tags tend to be more permanent. What do you do when you come back to the commit with the tag, cherry pick it over and delete the tag? It sounds like an overly complicated process compared to having a branch and rebasing onto the current branch when you finally go to make the change for real.
Local branches aren't names for anything other humans beings care about. All "branches" discussed in a team are remote. But because branches have "history" and "state", keeping your local names around is just inviting them to get out of sync with identically or similarly-named branches out there in the rest of the world.
> It sounds like an overly complicated process compared to having a branch and rebasing onto the current branch when you finally go to make the change for real.
Not sure I understand the problem here? The rebase is the hard part. It doesn't help you to have a name for the code you're coming "from". If it collides it collides and you have to resolve it.
What I said about tags was just as short term memory "This commit right here worked on this date", stored in a way that (unless I delete or force-update the tag) I can't forget or pollute. Branches don't have that property. And again local branches don't have any advantages.
At first I was put aback by this, but it actually kinda makes sense. I mean, if people are giving off unwarranted advises about "the right way" here, yeah, you should start with a remote branch, and push all your work ASAP. Especially when you are closing the lid of your laptop to change location.
...Not that I am gonna follow that advice, of course. Same as I'm not gonna use git switch for a task git checkout does perfectly well.
Agreed that UIs generally provide a better UX for Git.
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.
I've started recommending jj as a (git compatible) alternative to git, and one of the things I like about it is that the default action if you run `jj` with no arguments shows the relevant parts of the commit tree and where you are in it. This is a great reorientation tool, because you can see at a glance which commit you're working on right now, the branches and history associated with it, any other active branches in your repository, and for each you can see whether each commit had messages, changes associated with it, etc.
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.
GUI git clients are amazing in the hands of expert users, but terrible for any newcomer that has to actually use Git (and it's not like a designer checking out the source once or twice 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.
I advocate this with every newbie to git - find a UI that works for you and use it over the cli. Barely anyone listens though, and then they struggle with the cli and make a mess of their branches and fall out of date with main and are scared of rebasing and have many other issues that are solvable with a drag and drop or similar in a UI. I figure it's a sort of masochism.
I have not used such a tool in a long time, and never with git: but my past experience with GUI frontends for version control was that they work fine when everything is working fine, but once you have a mess to clean up, nobody can help you.
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.
The cli is faster if you know by heart but a real disadvantage is that it is hard to "see" what you did or what happened in the past. Good look finding where/whether an old branch got merged and find out if it is part of a release, using cli.
Is this really true? When I want to reorder commits, I just drag & drop in a GUI and I’m done. Or if I want to switch branch or manage a complex mix of rebases or cherry picks, it’s just 2 or 3 clicks. In CLI, by the time I’ve typed out the commit hash or locator, it’s already taken longer. And I type 130 words per minute.
lazygit ! Just needed to throw out a mention because it’s an amazing tui for visual orientation, is super fast, and can be used with a mouse and keyboard (or just keyboard) from the terminal. I saw it mentioned on a thread here last year and have preferred it as a fast “oh crap I think I made a mess lets back up” tool over the more complex gui apps I’ve tried (almost all of them).
I agree, I have used git for more than 10 years and it's the only tool that I refuse to learn. The command-line interface is cryptic and infuriating. I'd rather write assembly language again than learn what is essentially a CLI to the internals of git. It's not high-level, it's not intuitive, and it can be destructive if you don't use the right option. I stick to GUIs and simple actions, and I never had any problems compared to all the horror stories of my CLI-loving coworkers.
As a magit user I agree, apart from the fact most GUIs I've seen are horrendously broken and can lead to an even worse mess. For example, I was really confused about how a colleague messing up and got them to show me. Turns out in VS Code if you set the upstream branch correctly (ie. to master), it tries to get you to "sync" the branch. So it assumes the upstream branch is the branch you push to, which makes no sense at all.
In more than one team I've been on over the years, I was the only person with a deep understanding of Git. What I've found as a result of being the "oh shit git" guy is that
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.
For me, once a year and I have to use the reflog. But using a GUI is so much faster and safer that I won't change. Mercurial and Jujutsu have good command-lines, why can't git do the same?
to summarise: use the desktop apps now, but thou shalt need to learn the CLI.
—
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.
—
> 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.
The GitHub effect is real, like all network effects, but that doesn't mean improvement is impossible. I've switched entirely to jj, and it having git compatibility means that I don't need to rely on anyone else to make that happen.
I am growing increasingly frustrated with various aspects of GitHub, and so I hope someday we all move past it too, but I don't think there's as simple of a path forward there.
SVN has always worked for me. You don’t have to “teach” people SVN because it’s intuitive and works just fine for the 99% case. I wish we would all stop larping as 1337 hackerz and just admit that git is overkill for the vast majority of people.
Starting a new repo in SVN is find a server somewhere, if doesn't have SVN install SVN, if it does have SVN deal with whatever politics runs its trunk to find space/define a branch structure for you, and so forth.
It is its own footgun as well, but with git you can git init any directory you want and have a repo. Other than the learning curve of the not particularly well tuned CLI (and there are all sorts of graphical clients today and alternative CLI clients), it's very low barrier to entry to get something/anything in source control.
It's not just "larping as leet hackerz", there are real benefits to git over SVN. There are fewer barriers to entry for small teams and hobby devs, especially in a world with GitHub/GitLab/Sourcehut/and more, but also in the world where maybe a git repo never syncs with any other single machine or is hosted on the barest feature set SAMBA folder or is only ever using email-based PR flows.
git could be easier to teach. git could have a better out of the box CLI. That doesn't mean "git is overkill" especially from the point of view of "needing a whole central server setup just to store multiple versions of a file is overkill". Git is perhaps "underkill", it does the bare minimum as best it can in whatever environment you give it. It's intentionally dumb and stupid (hence its name, to be fair) and it's learning curve is as much because it is "too dumb" than because it "isn't intuitive". I've seen some "intuitive" UIs built on top of it. Another comment here remarked "git isn't a source control system, it's a low level toolkit for building your own" and that's not far from the truth and definitely not far from git's origins (and its name). That's a sort of "underkill". ("One day we'll finally build the right, intuitive high level API." That's basically how git was designed. You don't have to just take my word on that, you can search the old mailing lists for all sorts of interesting discussions and debates on "porcelain" options.)
>Starting a new repo in SVN is find a server somewhere, if doesn't have SVN install SVN, if it does have SVN deal with whatever politics runs its trunk to find space/define a branch structure for you, and so forth.
Many years ago, SVN worked fine for me for single-user projects. I just made my own desktop be the server. But I wasn't publishing my code back then (it's not as if I would have have any effective way to tell people about it anyway). Now I have no idea how the equivalent of "pushing to origin" would have worked.
Around the period I might have adopted SVN I recall it was a huge pain, if not impossible, to install on a Windows desktop; I tried multiple times, failed at each attempt, and eventually gave up. I was also in some labs at the time where we weren't allowed RDP to personal machines or services, or the lab machines just weren't great at it, or both (depending on the exact type of lab class and how worried the professor was of plagiarism), and mostly only had access to dumb sftp systems during the labs. That's when I discovered and fell in love with darcs. Distributed source control is great. Source control that you can push changes to/from the dumbest file systems is a super power. (Just the other year, even, I was using git and a dumb folder share to move source control changes to and from a VM that was firewalled from any network traffic because it had to be.) I miss some of the smarts of darcs still somewhat regularly having adjusted to this timeline where git won handily, but I'm not going back to a centralized source control system and git is "good enough" most of the time.
I agree with your sentiment. I was kind of "forced" to use (and eventually fully migrate to) git because the IDE integration to SVN became more quirky every year. Instead, git is already integrated in IDEs these days.
Clearly you have never needed code search across 50+ SVN repositories before, then. ;)
No, but seriously, I wrote https://andrew-quinn.me/reposurgeon for a reason. While I actually see some big benefits to SVN over git for areas with large binary assets like game development, the tool is just so ancient these days that it's just easier for me to convert SVN repos to git repos and then use those to figure out what I actually need to do. It feels a lot like working with Laplace transforms, translating and un-translating between two not quite equal ways of measuring reality.
That's not even considering that the kinds of companies still using SVN in 2025 tend to have a lot of code to wade through. Serious selection effects in play there -- mostly for good, to be clear.
I’m pumped a search for hg+mercurial had hits in this thread. I am and will continue to be completely blown that hg lost the dvcs wars. It’s a better tool.
It is the unquestioningly better tool right now. It's available, stable, battle-tested and it's actively supported. It's a case of "being the change you want to see". Just use it. Claims that it lost are counterproductive. The implicit deterrence from those statements is what is actively keeping Mercurial's adoption low.
Hosting is available at least from Sourcehut and heptapod.host.
I'm running a private Heptapod instance (Gitlab fork with direct Mercurial support). It just works.
I believe I have a good mental model of what git does, but I never remember commands' arguments to use when they are moderately complex. I mean that the commands are not discoverable or easy to memorize.
I don't know if that's because the text UI is bad, or because it's simply difficult to explain with text what to do to manipulate a tree.
I'm not proud of it, but my #1 "Oh shit" git operation is to just delete my local repo, reclone, and reapply the changes. Works really well for me 95% of the time. The rest I ask dev ops guy to help.
I've been using Git for almost 15 years, and have twice built programs/products that use Git internally to achieve certain results (that is, the program/product itself uses Git for things, not just using Git to manage the source code for the program/product) and... sometimes before doing something a little gnarly in Git I'll still just do "cp -R .git ../git-backup" or something like that, so I can replace my entire .git dir with an older copy if I screw it up too bad. It's a ton faster than figuring out the right way to un-fuck any particular operation or set of operations.
git break-my-shit
git reflog
... output saying where you were before things broke
... grab the good commit sha
git reset --hard good_commit_sha_from_reflog
The copy-the-.git-dir trick works for worse issues than can be solved with a single reset --hard. Damn near anything, really, as long as you haven't touched any remotes. It also works if you don't remember/understand how you broke it, where it's broken, or which state you need to try to reset to.
Jujutsu has `jj undo`, but which undoes whatever was your last jj command, regardless of what it was. It makes much more confident to do an operation I'm uncertain of. And if I regret something many actions down the line, you have `jj op log` (a better reflog).
Such a simple operation, but it'd probably fix 95% of problems I've had with git.
"Uh oh, I tried to checkout a branch from remote by doing `git checkout origin/some-branch` instead of `git checkout some-branch` and made a couple source changes. Now I'm in detached head state. What is detached head ? I have to stash my revisions? Can I make a new branch with the same name or do I need to delete the origin/some-branch that I'm on?"
When you could be able to just revert the "operation" and check out the correct branch, that's amazing.
Every time I see `git reflog`, I see it as re-flog. It's possible that's even the reason I never remember the command, I subconsciously can't bring myself to think of it as "reference log". Instead, it's asking git to sell something cheaply, again.
I'm not a git user, but stuff like this really drives home the idea that "git commit" is meaningless, the only thing that matters is when your commits are pushed or merged.
It's like saving a textfile. Do you write a little message every time you save a file? No that's silly. Just move on.
If I'm saving changes that were done because of a arduous debugging journey and other people are likely to have to refer back to it, yes. In fact, forget little; the smaller the change is, the bigger the text. Some of my changes have 2-3 paragraphs for a 2-3 line change because of the impact.
It seems painfully obvious to me that local and remote commits serve different purposes. Local commits are a way to create checkpoints when everything compiles and works and you can move on to the next step. That way you can stash your changes and go back to a working state when you screw things up. Then, before you push those changes, you reset them and split them into proper commits. That way the history is all nice and clean on the remote and it's not just a bunch of "wip"s.
Or you can just squash-merge your PRs and reap both benefits.
I think people would generally have an easier time with git if they didn't try to fix their commit histories and instead just let their past mistakes be known. If you make a bad commit in git the best solution is to follow it up with a good one that fixes the problem. Squash commits on PRs help too.
>It's like saving a textfile. Do you write a little message every time you save a file? No that's silly. Just move on.
Do you write a little message about your day every time you go to sleep?
I actually don't, and maybe you don't, but plenty of people do.
I think of the Git revision log as much like that sort of diary, offering the same sorts of advantages. It's more organized than having a separate TODO list document; and it encourages you to describe what you've already done in a clear readable way, too. When you're trying to figure out how far to roll back, it may be useful to understand what you were thinking at the time of the commit. And if something turned out to be the wrong approach, it helps you do the post-mortem.
And, of course: if your unmerged, unpushed work is organized into separate changes that have separate (and labelled goals), and part of that work turns out to be good and part bad, it becomes vastly easier to preserve the good parts.
Well, it is all local until you push so you can do whatever you want.
With that said, it obviously is not meaningless at a technical level because without the commit there is nothing to push or merge. On top of that, at a non-technical level it can be extremely helpful to record some plain-english prose to describe why you are changing something. If you find yourself doing that too often you need to narrow your definition of what constitutes a "change" and/or be more discerning about what you work on simultaneously.
Out of curiosity, if you do not use git, what do you use for version control and change-management?
I actually use git for my todolist/diary and I have an alias for when I want to save which does git commit -m "whatever." Basically I do that so I can view the updated version in the mobile app.
Commit is what causes git to make a copy of the file(s) internally. It's vitally important. But there is no point typing in silly messages like "more fixes" etc. What I do is make an initial commit with something like "(WIP) too feature", then keep doing amend commits until I'm happy, at which point I remove the "(WIP)" from the message.
If you orphan the object by not having anything point to it, it goes away when "git gc" is run. That happens automatically after about two weeks by default.
Even things like "git add" will create objects stored in the .git folder.
Git manages pretty much everything by using the `.git` folder created by `git init` and there is (as far as I am aware) nothing stopping you from going into that .git folder and running init again there to start using git to manage the internal state of your repository. At least... that is what I assumed the joke was.
> Only amend commits that only exist in your local copy or you're gonna have a bad time.
"Gonna have a bad time?" I really wish things like this were explained in more detail, rather than with glib warnings that are unhelpful unless you already know what they mean.
The commit you're amending doesn't exist on your copy anymore, despite existing on the remote that you've pushed to.
Warnings about detaching the HEAD in git are so common that they're kind of assumed to be basic knowledge to a lot of people. Explaining why it's bad if you don't already know would take quite a while too.
I do wish git had some form of warning before you rewrite history that's been pushed somewhere. It should already have all the data to know that.
For a developer, one of the most useful things that LLMs can do is help out with Git issues.
It really says something about the design and documentation of a tool when you need a (far more complex and energy-intensive) Artificial Intelligence to be able to use it without making too many mistakes.
Oh how I wish more devs would just read the documentation for the tools they pick. I read the git documentation end-to-end. Never really had any issues with it and most commands feels natural to use.
If you memorize the documentation I suppose there's no problem with it, but even then there's confusing things from the beginning design approach.
Like, reset vs revert vs restore, using three similar starting synonyms for different operations.
Reset is particularly confusing because it sounds incredibly destructive, but if you do a soft 'git reset', it just moves the "changes to be committed" to be not staged for the commit.
Then, if you change a single flag (--hard) it is destructive, instead erasing all those changes from your disk.
And there's a reason nobody reads the docs, because they're laid out confusingly at first glance to an unfamiliar person.
If I go to git-scm.com, click docs, the first suggestion is the reference manual. The first guide is on "gitattributes" which gives no philosophy or context as to what it is even used for. Ok, maybe, I'll just check the complete list of git commands... and it starts talking about porcelain and plumbing. Nope, thats not what I need. Maybe try the link "git" under Setup and Config. There the description finally links to a useful "gittutorial" page.
The gittutorial even has some confusing or specific terminology that makes git seem hard. From the beginning of importing a new project "Assume you have a tarball project.tar.gz with your initial work"... why do we need to refer to tar at all, and it doesn't even do the credit of explaining the tar xzf command or what that tarball is. It could easily say 'assume you have a directory', which is the more common case and be 200% more simple.
Avoid `git reset --hard` and `git clean -xfd`. To get a clean working-tree, use `git stash --all`. Allows restoring files if necessary. Saved my sorry bottom multiple times.
Lately I've been asked to avoid merge-commits. They pollute the logs?
If my push is blocked I am too far behind I create a new temp branch of master and do a "merge --squash" to it and then a "reset --hard" from temp branch back to my original branch.
Heck sometimes I rather keep my changes in patches to void does darn merge CONFLICTS...specially when rebasing.
Hard to understand exactly what your issue is here. Typically when people say "avoid merge commits" they mean they want you to almost always rebase instead of merge. Can you give an example or something?
The thing is if you merge immediately into master and have conflicts, you solve the conflict and only then you can merge. But then the conflict resolution sits at the merge point with a weird default commit message and is hard to decipher.
A nicer way is merge master into your branch, with the rebase option (you can set that option as the default). This will put your changes on top of the master changes that happened during populating your own branch. There you solve any conflicts and those usually immediately show you what happened in the meantime, making it easier to do so. The latest greatest now sits in your branch.
Then as a plus, you can retest that merge and if necessary, fix the merge.
Optionally you can do a pull request for reviewing. The diff the reviewers see is conflict-less and makes sense, has only your changes.
Then simply merge to master, which should be trivial if you don't wait for long.
I think that people that think merge commits "pollute the logs" are missing key git features such as `--first-parent`. Git is natively a graph. It gets a lot of powers from that. If you don't want to see all the details of the "subway diagram", add `--first-parent` as a default and focus on the higher level. Merge commits help avoid later conflicts by saving how earlier conflicts were solved. Three-way merging in general and many of git's more complex merging strategies all work better if you save the merge commits. Rebasing throws that baby of information out with the bath water. (It's also useful information to have as a developer needing to archeology dive for how a regression happened. With a merge commit you can see the fingerprints of a bad merge or a mistake that wasn't caught in an ugly merge. With a rebase or squash that information is gone, you have no idea where to find the bad or ugly merges, that data is swept under the rug.)
On top of this, integration is an "interesting" step on its own! When trying to diagnose an issue it can be super valuable to be able to understand whether it was broken from the start or broken by the merge. Rebasing throws all of that valuable information away!
Reading these tips confirms that I'm too stoopid to use git.
Fortunately, I don't have to use git. So I just store work-in-progress as time-stamped files. Storage is cheap and plentiful. Can always diff, cherry pick, etc without confusing myself.
I swear there used to be a choose your own adventure version of this where you could answer questions about what you did wrong and get a step-by-step "here's what to do" after.
Git is one of those technologies that I never got to wrap my head around of, because in so many ways it doesn't follow intuition and unless you have been using it for a long time, for literally every action you would probably have to Google or use the man page of the command.
Git commands, while they may be cryptic, actually mean something. Whereas that was just gibberish made by putting random mathematical words together.
(There is a similar sounding joke about category theory, "A monad is just a monoid in the category of endofunctors" but this sentence has a mathematical meaning.)
Did you start with Git or have you used other VCS systems before? I started with SVN and then coming to Git, there were obviously things to learn about how it was different but honestly it felt to me like it made things easier in many ways (since I'd experienced the horror of a very large codebase in SVN with lots of branches, and trying to track those and merge back together - git is so much better at that, it's crazy)...
I can see how it would be a much bigger learning curve if people come straight to git, but it's still hard for me to understand where the blocker is that so many people complain about using it...
I was trying to delete a file from history yesterday.
The built in way (filter-branch) pops up a warning, with a long delay, saying you should hit Control+C and go download a third party python script called filter-repo...
Possibly consider that "deleting a file from history" is rather far outside the norm or recommended practice for git (even though it is, of course, entirely possible)
I take the more realistic perspective: until git makes it impossible to commit something that shouldn't have been, like a secret, then deleting a file from history is a fundamental requirement of git.
The designers of git clearly disagreed, as you can guess from its design, so it's not surprising it might feel like a bit of an uphill struggle (and will probably remain so). There are other tools available.
Since you brought it up, I personally switched to jujutsu and prefer it greatly. I regularly help coworkers deal with issues in git and keep dropping hints like `in jujutsu this would've been done way easier like this!`. Nobody bites yet since I think most of them don't want to use the CLI but maybe someday if enough people keep talking about it the inertia will get to the point that we can get some really slick GUIs for jj.
I'm happy I didn't have to scroll too far to see this.
Git's CLI isn't elegant, but it really isn't that big of a deal if you understand the basics of what a commit is, what a branch is etc.
I struggle to understand why so many devs decide to treat it like mysterious arcane sorcery instead of just spending the needed time on learning how it works.
The same can be said about regexes.
Regexes and git are probably the two tools which I have benefitted the most from learning compared to how little time I've spend on learning them - and I wouldn't even consider myself an expert on either.
> it really isn't that big of a deal if you understand the basics of what a commit is, what a branch is etc.
Yes, that's what people mean when they say that git is hard. Instead of presenting you with an interface expressed in terms of the domain you intend to work in, whose commands represent the tasks you intend to perform, git dumps its guts all over the place and requires each user to re-implement the interface between "what you want to do" and "how git is built" inside their own brains instead. Once you have written git's missing user interface in your brain, you are fine; but that's a lot of work which is not necessary with other version-control systems.
>I struggle to understand why so many devs decide to treat it like mysterious arcane sorcery instead of just spending the needed time on learning how it works.
For example: you have bazilion ways to achieve the same thing, all of them having its own quirks/advantages?
It is just poorly designed, that's it, lol.
I like to joke that if somebody else invented Git, then it'd be 10% less powerful, but 10 times more user-friendly
But any software evolves over time so if it had fewer ways of doing things in the past, it would very likely eventually pick them up because people have use cases for the advanced features.
It's like complaining about languages ("English is hard to spell and doesn't have consistent pronunciation" etc.), they're constantly changing and that kind of thing is going to happen eventually...
Git is a technology that was invented to simplify things that ended up getting so complex over time that an entire industry started up around it to try to make it simple again.
Actually, no. Git was a technology invented specifically to enable Linux kernel development. It hasn't become any more complex since its inception. The problem is most people aren't doing kernel development and have absolutely no idea what a distributed version control system is, yet they use git, a distributed version control system. I have no idea why we use it, to be honest, but I'm very glad that we do because the previous options were crap. Perhaps Mercurial is better, but git is good enough.
We were using svn before Git and easy cloning (and then PRs) has solved a LOT of problems. There are definitely still some things left to improve, though.
The one thing I wish people would internalise about git is it's an append only data store. To get work into the store, you commit it. Once in the store there is not a command in git that can remove it.
This is how the reflog works. Whatever you do, you can get back to a previous branch state and restore the work from the data store.
But git can't help you if you don't commit. So just commit. Commit all the time. If you think it's too much overhead and you always forget to commit, fix your tools. If you're writing code all day you should be committing at a minimum every hour, in general.
Oh shit, I accidentally `git reset HEAD~1` and moved the last commit to file diffs, which was a merge to master, and my file diff now is both the last branch merge and everything I've done in the last 8hrs. I did this once and it was a gigantic PITA to undo, if anyone has any hot tips for that particular idiocy...
Yeah, please don't create sites like this. Just... don't.
Any, and I mean any "in case of a Git problem, just do this" recipe is wrong, often in very subtle ways. So, my advice: in case of a Git problem, contact the help channel provided by the organization hosting your Git repository. They'll help you out! And if it's your personal-I-am-truly-the-only-human-using-this repository? Just recreate it, and save yourself the pain.
Source: I'm part of the team behind the #githelp channel in many $DAYJOBs, and we know how hard things are. You committed an unencrypted password file, or worse, your entire 'secret' MP4 collection to our monorepo? Sure, just let us know! Pushed your experimental branch to master/main/head/whatever? We'll fix it!
Just don't ever, for whatever reason, run that-chain-of-commands you found on the Internet, without understanding what they do! In most cases, your initial mistake can be undone pretty quickly (despite requiring nonstandard tooling), but once you're three levels deep and four days later, not so much...
I've been using git for at least 6 years now, maybe 10.
Sites like this are a great aid to remembering how to deal with certain situations. And yes, I understand what the commands do, but that doesn't mean I always could, or always want to, put together the series of steps from scratch.
And also, we self-host our own gitea hosting because we're not getting sucked down by yet another hosting debacle (old enough to have suffered under sourceforge, and don't plan on getting in the same situation again). For git hosting just as much as everything else on line, if you're not paying for it, you're not the customer.
A 'team', by definition, consists of more people than 'you.'
And, by the time a '#githelp team' is formed, it's to address patterns to which there are known solutions.
One of the many problems with Git, is that these solutions depend very, very much on the structure of the repo and the common practices of its users.
So, instead of executing random commands from the Internet, just ask. Please! Or, if there's truly nobody going to be around, give in and recreate the repo. You'll save yourself so much pain in the long run...
> A 'team', by definition, consists of more people than 'you.'
I'm the resident git expert, but not by choice. There's more that I don't know than that I do. It's not uncommon that I need to use internet recipes to un-wedge someone's clone.
> Or, if there's truly nobody going to be around, give in and recreate the repo. You'll save yourself so much pain in the long run...
This is insane. There are a dozen other people using the remote, not to mention a whole CI/CD build configuration.
OK, so you've truly screwed up your your personal/small-team repos to the point of requiring poorly-understood command sequences from the Notoriously Reliable Internet more than once?
I don't understand your surprise or disbelief. I would imagine most devs have been there. As evidence: just look at Stack Overflow, and compare it to what it's apparently intended to look like and how it's supposed to work (as a denizen of meta.stackoverflow.com I am quite familiar with this struggle).
Bro, really, self-taught people with a bare minimum understanding of the tools they use are super normal, and when they get into a pit they have to fix it themselves.
Although to your point folks would be better served carefully reading the docs / git book than googling a specific solution to their specific error code.
For me, the value of things like this is in learning the terminology for what I broke and how to fix it. I'm not going to copy-and-paste advice off the Internet. I never have. It's still super helpful to see "oh, that thing I want to do is called frobnitzing the corple. Now I know what to Google!"
Yes. I think the ratio of small-team repos this describes is close to 100%. You seem to have a certain idea of how repos are managed. I don't think it's very representative of reality.
Recipes like these aren't useless, but yes, they really need to be prefixed with whether they expect to start from a clean work tree and empty staging area. Or describe what they'll do to uncommitted changes, both staged & unstaged. Otherwise they pose a substantial risk of making the problem worse.
Some changes I would make:
1. Always use `git switch` instead of `git checkout`
2. Avoid `reset --hard` at all costs. So for the "accidentally committed something to master that should have been on a brand new branch" issue, I would do this instead:
3. I'd apply the same to the `cherry-pick` version of "accidentally committed to the wrong branch": 4. And also to the "git-approved" way for "Fuck this noise, I give up.":The disconnect between git's beautiful internal model of blobs, a tree of commits, and pointers to commits, and the command line interface is so wild. All of these recipes are unintuitive even if you have a firm grasp of git's model; you also need to know the quirks of the commands! To just look at the first one... wouldn't it be more intuitive for the command line interface to be:
The real "internal model" of git contains much more data/moving parts.
There isn't one tree of commits, there are typically at least two: local and remote
Branches are not just pointers to commits, but also possibly related to pointers in the other tree via tracking.
Stash and index and the actual contents of the working directory are additional data that live outside the tree of commits. When op says "avoid git reset hard" it's because of how all these interact.
Files can be tracked, untracked and ignored not ignored. All four combinations are possible.
None of these seem to preclude a command to make an arbitrary branch point to an arbitrary commit without changing anything else.
You are looking for
Wouldn't the fail or break under any circumstance where they don't immediately share a history?
This works if the branch exists or creates it if it doesn't exist, but not if it's checked out.
if it's checked out:> but not if it's checked out
...and for a good reason that should be apparent to anyone who understands git's model (HEAD points to a ref in this case, so if you suddenly change what that ref points to without updating the working tree you create an inconsistency).
You can do that manually of course (with `git update-ref` or even a text editor), but then you get to clean up the mess yourself.
To me that looks like git is leaking implementation details left and right.
So much for "a branch is simply a pointer to a commit"...
Do you react the same way when an OS prevents you from writing to a file with an exclusive lock placed on it? So much for "a file is simply a collection of data stored as a single object"...
If a git repo was purely a collection of meaningless pointers and graph nodes, git would be a graph manipulation utility, not a version control system. The fact that some of those pointers have a meaning is what makes it useful and it doesn't contradict the fact that what you're working on is still just a bunch of pointers and nodes.
Couldn't head just detach without any consistency issue?
Theoretically it could, but that would be a rather surprising side effect. You could also check the new revision out and leave HEAD intact. Which one of those outcomes you would expect and why?
"error: ref in use by higher layers" makes much more sense to me in this case.
If you buy the "git is just a tree of commits and pointers" mental model it's absolutely not a surprising side effect but would be the logical thing to expect. I moved a pointer to a commit around, why would that change where HEAD is pointed.
Turns out it's a tree of commits and pointers to within that tree and a master pointer that come in two versions: pointing towards the pointers or pointing towards the tree. And pointers behave very differently when the master pointer is pointing to them...
Elegant. Simple. :P
> I moved a pointer to a commit around, why would that change where HEAD is pointed.
...because HEAD points to what's checked out. This pointer does not just exist and hang around, it has its semantics. Not understanding that reveals flaws in your mental model.
Besides, the side affect you find "not surprising" here is... rewriting HEAD to change what it points to. Then you ask "why would that change where HEAD is pointed". Sounds like you may be confused. Are you forgetting that a ref may point not just to a commit, but also to another ref? This is the whole idea behind branches after all, having HEAD point to a ref is exactly what makes branches semantically different from tags - if you don't understand it then no wonder you're confused.
(protip: if you find git's "pointers to pointers" confusing, perhaps because in C a "pointer" and "pointer to pointer" are separate types that make multiple dereferencing steps explicit, think of them as symlinks instead and it should become clearer - that's in fact how symrefs used to be implemented in the past)
When a pointer is in use by higher layers, a good UI will prevent you from making direct changes underneath it unless you force it or go low-level enough for it to not matter. The only sin of git I can see here is that `git` command provides you both high-level and low-level interfaces to manipulate the data structure you're working on with no clear distinction for the user.
It doesn't seem surprising to me. It probably ought to print ought a warning that head has detached though, like some other commands already do. That error message on the other hand seems very unhelpful. It's lingo that only makes sense if you're neck deep in the plumbing.
There's no such message there, it was a description of a situation written by me and it doesn't even actually match the git's lingo. Should have made it clearer I guess.
It is surprising. You wanted to edit the value of `main` ref, yet suddenly you now edited `HEAD` too without meaning it. Bailing out and letting you actually decide whether you want to do it or not is the correct thing to do for a high-level command like `git branch` (alternatively it could ask you what to do interactively). If you don't want such safeguards and you know what you're doing, use `git update-ref` which will happily let you break whatever you want.
The "move a branch from one commit to another without changing anything" command is "git reset".
"git reset --hard" is "...and also change all the files in the working directory to match the new branch commit".
"git reset --soft" is "...but leave the working directory alone".
Actually, "git reset --soft" moves the current branch to another commit, without moving the index (aka staging area) along with it, whereas "git reset" (aka "git reset --mixed") moves the current branch AND the index to another commit. I really couldn't wrap my head around it before I had gone through "Reset demystified" [1] a couple times - it's not a quick read but I can strongly recommend it.
[1] https://git-scm.com/book/en/v2/Git-Tools-Reset-Demystified
git reset only works if you're on the branch you want to move, which is why every one of these example flows has you create your new branch, then do the reset, then switch to the new branch, instead of just allowing you to move a branch you're not on.
> The disconnect between git's beautiful internal model of blobs, a tree of commits, and pointers to commits, and the command line interface is so wild
Something I heard somewhere that stuck with me: git is less less of a Version Control System, and more of a toolkit for assembling your own flavor of one.
> Something I heard somewhere that stuck with me: git is less less of a Version Control System, and more of a toolkit for assembling your own flavor of one.
That's how it is in principle, but it seems to me that there aren't that many different CLI "porcelains" in practice. Kind of like how Knuth figured people would essentially write their DSLs on top of plain TeX, not spend most of their time in giant macro packages like LaTeX.
> That's how it is in principle, but it seems to me that there aren't that many different CLI "porcelains" in practice.
I think that's because most of the people that make custom tooling to support particular workflows build it into graphical (including IDE extensions, web-based. etc.) frontends, not CLIs.
I prefer just using `git switch` because it's easy to remember the flags (and the position of arguments), but you're right, there is a simpler way:
You should also be able to do
This doesn't work if your local master was already ahead of origin
Indeed, as with all of these examples exceptions will apply and, it's a good idea to check the log before taking any such action. I believe your example also depends on exactly how many commits you've made that need to be moved. In any case, it depends on me remembering exactly what `~` signifies.
Good to know! Thanks for the tip.
Are there alternative git command lines that keep the beautiful internals, but implement a more elegant and intuitive set of commands to manage it?
Check out jujutsu or jj (same thing). It's its own VCS, but it uses git as a backend, so it works with GitHub and other git integrations
Another vote for jujutsu. No one else needs to know you're using it. You can think of it as just a different CLI for git (although you shouldn't mix them). I used to use third-party interfaces like lazygit, but I don't need them anymore because jujutsu _just makes sense_.
Seconded jujutsu. It's 100% git-compatible and one of those rare birds that is both more powerful and simpler to use in practice due to rethinking some of the core ideas.
Lazygit has a terminal UI but might otherwise be what you're looking for: https://github.com/jesseduffield/lazygit
The "move a branch" command is `git push .`. Yes, you can push to the current repo. I have a script called git-update-branch which just does some preflight checks and then runs `git push --no-verify . +$branch@{upstream}:$branch` to reset a branch back to its upstream version.
> The "move a branch" command is `git push .`. Yes, you can push to the current repo.
Wouldn't that copy a branch rather than moving it?
For move-branch: Use `git branch -f master HEAD~` if you're currently on another branch, or `git reset --soft HEAD~` if you're currently on master.
> is there a command that simply moves a branch from one commit to another without changing anything else? It feels like it should be possible given how git works.
git switch -C master HEAD~
Not trying to defend the choice of `git checkout` over `git switch` (and `git restore`) but they were introduced in v2.23 of Git [0], which was released about 5 years ago [1]. If you take a look at their help pages, they still include a warning that says
> THIS COMMAND IS EXPERIMENTAL. THE BEHAVIOR MAY CHANGE.
Granted, it has been in there for basically as long as the command(s) existed [2] and after 5 years perhaps it might be time to no longer call it experimental.
Still, it does seem like `git checkout` might be a bit more backwards compatible (and also reflective of the time when this website was originally created).
[0] https://github.com/git/git/blob/757161efcca150a9a96b312d9e78...
[1] https://github.com/git/git/releases/tag/v2.23.0
[2] https://github.com/git/git/commit/4e43b7ff1ea4b6f16b93a432b6...
5. Teaching `git add .` as default to add changes to the staging area is not ideal. Show adding specific files instead has less room for subsequent "oh shit" and better.
Learning about the `-p` option for `git add` was one of two things that revolutionized my Git usage. (The other was figuring out how to write effective commit messages.)
This is the main reason to use a GUI imho.
Tig is a great one for the terminal fwiw.
gitg for something simple, graphical and widely available.
True enough, but it does make for good practice with the index and splitting workflows later on when you need to clean it up.
I think there's space for "git add ." as a didactic step. It maps cleanly to the most obvious way to understand a commit, as "here's what I've done". Bootstrapping from that to an understanding of "commits as communication with other developers" will naturally happen over time.
Is not very compatible with printlog-debugging. I'd rather encourage devs to prod around as they go if it benefits them, which causes grief for either them or reviewers in the end if they've internalized what you just said.
Explicitly adding internalizes a personal review process as inherent part of the push process, instead of something you attempt to force on top later.
It's better with a collaboration workflow that limits the span of time with expected discipline, imo.
You can have both. Make sure the whole diff is what you want it to be before invoking `add .`
Sure. I hear the pull-out method is also an effective contraceptive.
If it works for you, I'm not going to try to talk you out of it.
Could you motivate why you suggest these? Why is `switch` better than `checkout`? And why not use `reset --hard`?
Not comment OP, but checkout has two very different uses merged into one: restoring files and switching branches. To not break compatibility, git has now switch and restore commands that make commands more readable and understandable.
You should avoid reset --hard because it will delete all your uncommited, and you could end up in situations where that's really bad. Using reset --keep will keep uncommited changes, and failing if any uncommited change cannot be kept.
I just do
What do you mean avoid "reset --hard"? Why or why is it not enough in practice? I use it quite often, along with "alias git-restore-file='git restore --source=HEAD --'". It seems to work.
What's the problem with `reset --hard`?
It leaves behind tracked files that were moved or deleted between revisions.
> 2. Avoid `reset --hard` at all costs
Sounds like you might be looking for `git reset --keep`
Rewriting these for jj users. I'm prefering long option names and full command names for clarity here, but all the commands have shortened aliases and all the option names have single-letter alternatives. `@` means "the current revision", `x+` means "the revision just after `x`", `x-` means "the revision just before `x`".
2. "Accidentally committed something to master that should have been on a brand new branch".
This doesn't really have an analogue. Branches ("bookmarks") only move when you tell them to. If you make a new commit on top of master, it doesn't point master to it, it just lives one past the tip of master. But let's say you accidentally moved master to include the new commit you shouldn't have:
3. Move a commit from one branch to another. 4. Fuck this noise, I give up: Bonus content, translated from the article:> Oh shit, I committed and immediately realized I need to make one small change!
> Oh shit, I need to change the message on my last commit! > Oh shit, I tried to run a diff but nothing happened?! > Oh shit, I need to undo a commit from like 5 commits ago! > Oh shit, I need to undo my changes to a file! And finally there are a few things that are super easy/obvious in jujutsu that are far more annoying in git.> Oh shit, I committed and many commits later realized I need to make one small change!
> Oh shit, I committed and many commits later realized I need to make extensive changes! > Oh shit, I need to reorder two commits! > Oh shit, I haven't committed anything in hours but I need something from an interim change from like thirty minutes ago > Oh shit, I made a bunch of changes but want them to be in multiple commits (e.g., patch-add workflow) > Oh shit, I need to break out a change from my current work into a new branch off master > Oh shit, I need to make three sequential changes but roll them out one-by-one. I also might need to make fixes to previous ones before later ones are rolled out.Please kindly write one for a jj-specific issue: "my build vomitted out a bunch of files and I used any jj command before editing my .gitignore"
I've found myself using git to fix the mess in this particular instance.
One thing I really appreciate is that you can run `jj new master` at _any_ time to drop what you're doing and start a new change. The way jj handles the working copy, conflicts, and visible heads means there's just no need to think about uncommitted changes, unfinished conflict resolution, detached head, etc.. So many things that would get in your way just can't happen.
I haven’t thought about it at all but you’re right. It’s surprising how nice it is that I can enter a repo and `jj new main` without needing to remember any context whatsoever.
My post was a pretty naked attempt to showcase how much less convoluted basic operations are in jj vs. git and hopefully drum up some interest. Hopefully someone bites.
`jj new trunk()` is even better than `jj new main`, I just realized, ha!
It is! I've fully migrated my repos over to `main` at this point so it's rare I have to think about the difference. You could also make an alias to `jj n` or something to make it even easier.
git switch is too new and its man page says "THIS COMMAND IS EXPERIMENTAL. THE BEHAVIOR MAY CHANGE."
millennial boomer here where is the gen z cheat sheet for this git switch thing that i keep hearing about
> 1. Always use `git switch` instead of `git checkout`
Even harder: always use "git reset --hard".
Basically don't use local branches. The correct workflow for almost every task these days is "all branches are remote". Fetch from remotes. Reset to whatever remote branch you want to work above. Do your work. Push back to a remote branch (usually a pull request branch in common usage) when you're done.
If you need to manage local state, do it manually with tags (or stash, but IMHO I never remember what I stashed and will always make a dummy commit and tag it).
Don't ever try to manually manage a branch locally unless you (1) absolutely have to and (2) absolutely know what you're doing. And even then, don't, just use a hosted upstream like github or whatever.
This sounds like the correct Git workflow if you think the correct VCS to use is SVN.
And that sounds like you failed to understand me. I didn't say "don't use branches". I said "all branches are remote". Pushing to a branch is communication with other human beings. Mixing your own private state into that is confusing and needless in 99% of situations (and the remaining 1% is isomorphic to "you're a maintainer curating branches for pushing to other people at a well-known location").
All branches are public.
I have quite a few projects that do not have a "remote" and will probably never have a remote repo. Should I not be using branches at all?
> All branches are public.
What actual problem does this solve? For me, WIP branches only ever get pushed up if at least one of two things are true about them:
1) They're actually worth preserving, and not some experimental garbage that ended up being totally pointless.
2) I need to get them off of my local machine for disaster-recovery purposes.
> If you need to manage local state, do it manually with tags (or stash, but IMHO I never remember what I stashed and will always make a dummy commit and tag it).
I don't see the benefit one gets from putting work that's not fit for publication in a dummy commit on a public branch. That's just asking for garbage that noone should concern themselves with to accidentally get pushed up at the end of a long-ass day.
> 1) They're actually worth preserving, and not some experimental garbage that ended up being totally pointless.
That seems naive. You don't know what's pointless for years, usually. Can I tell you how many times I've gone back to stale pull requests and topic branches to recover "How did I do this?" code?
> 2) I need to get them off of my local machine for disaster-recovery purposes.
That's called a "backup", and yes, data robustness is a big advantage of this workflow. You're acting like this is some kind of rare event. I push my local work to a branch (or three) on github every hour!
A corrolary is hardware independence, btw. Working off remote branches means I can also stand up a replacement development environment with a simple clone. (And the corrolary to that means that I can trivially document this such that other people can stand up development environments for my stuff, too!)
This is a workflow I’ve never seen on any team or project I’ve worked on. Another commenter already mentioned the remote branch for everything preference, but usage of tags is especially interesting to me. I think that’s how most people use branches, and tags tend to be more permanent. What do you do when you come back to the commit with the tag, cherry pick it over and delete the tag? It sounds like an overly complicated process compared to having a branch and rebasing onto the current branch when you finally go to make the change for real.
Local branches aren't names for anything other humans beings care about. All "branches" discussed in a team are remote. But because branches have "history" and "state", keeping your local names around is just inviting them to get out of sync with identically or similarly-named branches out there in the rest of the world.
> It sounds like an overly complicated process compared to having a branch and rebasing onto the current branch when you finally go to make the change for real.
Not sure I understand the problem here? The rebase is the hard part. It doesn't help you to have a name for the code you're coming "from". If it collides it collides and you have to resolve it.
What I said about tags was just as short term memory "This commit right here worked on this date", stored in a way that (unless I delete or force-update the tag) I can't forget or pollute. Branches don't have that property. And again local branches don't have any advantages.
At first I was put aback by this, but it actually kinda makes sense. I mean, if people are giving off unwarranted advises about "the right way" here, yeah, you should start with a remote branch, and push all your work ASAP. Especially when you are closing the lid of your laptop to change location.
...Not that I am gonna follow that advice, of course. Same as I'm not gonna use git switch for a task git checkout does perfectly well.
We should start recommending UIs as the default way to learn Git. It would solve a third of these problems and another third wouldn't even come up.
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.
Agreed that UIs generally provide a better UX for Git.
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.
I've started recommending jj as a (git compatible) alternative to git, and one of the things I like about it is that the default action if you run `jj` with no arguments shows the relevant parts of the commit tree and where you are in it. This is a great reorientation tool, because you can see at a glance which commit you're working on right now, the branches and history associated with it, any other active branches in your repository, and for each you can see whether each commit had messages, changes associated with it, etc.
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.
Holy hell, I’ve used it for months now and had no idea.
GUI git clients are amazing in the hands of expert users, but terrible for any newcomer that has to actually use Git (and it's not like a designer checking out the source once or twice 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.
I advocate this with every newbie to git - find a UI that works for you and use it over the cli. Barely anyone listens though, and then they struggle with the cli and make a mess of their branches and fall out of date with main and are scared of rebasing and have many other issues that are solvable with a drag and drop or similar in a UI. I figure it's a sort of masochism.
I have not used such a tool in a long time, and never with git: but my past experience with GUI frontends for version control was that they work fine when everything is working fine, but once you have a mess to clean up, nobody can help you.
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.
> But first, people need to see visually how they can interact with the tree.
Interactive tutorial with tree visualization that has helped co-workers: https://learngitbranching.js.org/
Thank you for posting that!
The cli is faster if you know by heart but a real disadvantage is that it is hard to "see" what you did or what happened in the past. Good look finding where/whether an old branch got merged and find out if it is part of a release, using cli.
Is this really true? When I want to reorder commits, I just drag & drop in a GUI and I’m done. Or if I want to switch branch or manage a complex mix of rebases or cherry picks, it’s just 2 or 3 clicks. In CLI, by the time I’ve typed out the commit hash or locator, it’s already taken longer. And I type 130 words per minute.
> by the time I’ve typed out the commit hash
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.
Nah I’m talking about the short hash.
But I still have to find the short hash too, and then copy or re-type it… With a UI, I just… click click click done.
lazygit ! Just needed to throw out a mention because it’s an amazing tui for visual orientation, is super fast, and can be used with a mouse and keyboard (or just keyboard) from the terminal. I saw it mentioned on a thread here last year and have preferred it as a fast “oh crap I think I made a mess lets back up” tool over the more complex gui apps I’ve tried (almost all of them).
I agree, I have used git for more than 10 years and it's the only tool that I refuse to learn. The command-line interface is cryptic and infuriating. I'd rather write assembly language again than learn what is essentially a CLI to the internals of git. It's not high-level, it's not intuitive, and it can be destructive if you don't use the right option. I stick to GUIs and simple actions, and I never had any problems compared to all the horror stories of my CLI-loving coworkers.
As a magit user I agree, apart from the fact most GUIs I've seen are horrendously broken and can lead to an even worse mess. For example, I was really confused about how a colleague messing up and got them to show me. Turns out in VS Code if you set the upstream branch correctly (ie. to master), it tries to get you to "sync" the branch. So it assumes the upstream branch is the branch you push to, which makes no sense at all.
Came here to say the same - fork.dev is awesome.
I used to be a CLI git guy but haven't used it in years now
What the average amount of time until something goes wrong that can't be fixed in the UI?
In more than one team I've been on over the years, I was the only person with a deep understanding of Git. What I've found as a result of being the "oh shit git" guy is that
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.
For me, once a year and I have to use the reflog. But using a GUI is so much faster and safer that I won't change. Mercurial and Jujutsu have good command-lines, why can't git do the same?
disagree, with a caveat.
to summarise: use the desktop apps now, but thou shalt need to learn the CLI.
—
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.
—
> 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.
This will feel very weird in April 2025, when we celebrate the 20th anniversary of git.
I was there. And at some point I wondered if I should learn git, darcs, or bazaar, to replace SVN or CVS. Or did I try mercurial too ?
I wonder if the "GitHub" effect has basically killed the need for a newcomer in the space of VCS. Maybe at some point, the yak is shaved enough ?
The GitHub effect is real, like all network effects, but that doesn't mean improvement is impossible. I've switched entirely to jj, and it having git compatibility means that I don't need to rely on anyone else to make that happen.
I am growing increasingly frustrated with various aspects of GitHub, and so I hope someday we all move past it too, but I don't think there's as simple of a path forward there.
SVN has always worked for me. You don’t have to “teach” people SVN because it’s intuitive and works just fine for the 99% case. I wish we would all stop larping as 1337 hackerz and just admit that git is overkill for the vast majority of people.
Starting a new repo in SVN is find a server somewhere, if doesn't have SVN install SVN, if it does have SVN deal with whatever politics runs its trunk to find space/define a branch structure for you, and so forth.
It is its own footgun as well, but with git you can git init any directory you want and have a repo. Other than the learning curve of the not particularly well tuned CLI (and there are all sorts of graphical clients today and alternative CLI clients), it's very low barrier to entry to get something/anything in source control.
It's not just "larping as leet hackerz", there are real benefits to git over SVN. There are fewer barriers to entry for small teams and hobby devs, especially in a world with GitHub/GitLab/Sourcehut/and more, but also in the world where maybe a git repo never syncs with any other single machine or is hosted on the barest feature set SAMBA folder or is only ever using email-based PR flows.
git could be easier to teach. git could have a better out of the box CLI. That doesn't mean "git is overkill" especially from the point of view of "needing a whole central server setup just to store multiple versions of a file is overkill". Git is perhaps "underkill", it does the bare minimum as best it can in whatever environment you give it. It's intentionally dumb and stupid (hence its name, to be fair) and it's learning curve is as much because it is "too dumb" than because it "isn't intuitive". I've seen some "intuitive" UIs built on top of it. Another comment here remarked "git isn't a source control system, it's a low level toolkit for building your own" and that's not far from the truth and definitely not far from git's origins (and its name). That's a sort of "underkill". ("One day we'll finally build the right, intuitive high level API." That's basically how git was designed. You don't have to just take my word on that, you can search the old mailing lists for all sorts of interesting discussions and debates on "porcelain" options.)
>Starting a new repo in SVN is find a server somewhere, if doesn't have SVN install SVN, if it does have SVN deal with whatever politics runs its trunk to find space/define a branch structure for you, and so forth.
Many years ago, SVN worked fine for me for single-user projects. I just made my own desktop be the server. But I wasn't publishing my code back then (it's not as if I would have have any effective way to tell people about it anyway). Now I have no idea how the equivalent of "pushing to origin" would have worked.
Around the period I might have adopted SVN I recall it was a huge pain, if not impossible, to install on a Windows desktop; I tried multiple times, failed at each attempt, and eventually gave up. I was also in some labs at the time where we weren't allowed RDP to personal machines or services, or the lab machines just weren't great at it, or both (depending on the exact type of lab class and how worried the professor was of plagiarism), and mostly only had access to dumb sftp systems during the labs. That's when I discovered and fell in love with darcs. Distributed source control is great. Source control that you can push changes to/from the dumbest file systems is a super power. (Just the other year, even, I was using git and a dumb folder share to move source control changes to and from a VM that was firewalled from any network traffic because it had to be.) I miss some of the smarts of darcs still somewhat regularly having adjusted to this timeline where git won handily, but I'm not going back to a centralized source control system and git is "good enough" most of the time.
You can create a repo in a directory and use the local path in svn url without using any service or server process since the beginning of SVN.
You can even do it on shared directory for a small team even it's not recommended if there is a lot of concurrent users.
I just used the TortoiseSVN installer on a couple different machines and I recall it being perfectly smooth each time.
I agree with your sentiment. I was kind of "forced" to use (and eventually fully migrate to) git because the IDE integration to SVN became more quirky every year. Instead, git is already integrated in IDEs these days.
Clearly you have never needed code search across 50+ SVN repositories before, then. ;)
No, but seriously, I wrote https://andrew-quinn.me/reposurgeon for a reason. While I actually see some big benefits to SVN over git for areas with large binary assets like game development, the tool is just so ancient these days that it's just easier for me to convert SVN repos to git repos and then use those to figure out what I actually need to do. It feels a lot like working with Laplace transforms, translating and un-translating between two not quite equal ways of measuring reality.
That's not even considering that the kinds of companies still using SVN in 2025 tend to have a lot of code to wade through. Serious selection effects in play there -- mostly for good, to be clear.
Working with SVN was terribly slow on any decent size codebase.
svn is perfectly fine and intuitive as long as you never want to branch and merge
huh?
Svn can branch and merge - maybe bit more clunky but still works
SVN is more alien to me than git. Does that make you a LARPing epic hacker?
Any improvement will have to be git compatible at the very least, e.g. jj.
I’m pumped a search for hg+mercurial had hits in this thread. I am and will continue to be completely blown that hg lost the dvcs wars. It’s a better tool.
It is the unquestioningly better tool right now. It's available, stable, battle-tested and it's actively supported. It's a case of "being the change you want to see". Just use it. Claims that it lost are counterproductive. The implicit deterrence from those statements is what is actively keeping Mercurial's adoption low.
Hosting is available at least from Sourcehut and heptapod.host.
I'm running a private Heptapod instance (Gitlab fork with direct Mercurial support). It just works.
I use it every day!
Are there any public forges that support hg?
Have a look at heptapost.host for paid hosting and foss.heptapod.net for free public hosting for OSS. Is that what you are looking for?
> Are there any public forges that support hg?
Sourceforge, Sourcehut, and GNU Savannah all support Mercurial.
It's the slower tool.
I don’t mind if it is slightly slower, if that is even true anymore.
Turns out while hg clone, pull, or whatever is running, I can do other things!
That was relevant to Linus in the early 2000s, but then, we didn't have NVMe SSDs.
It is still noticeably slower on a large codebase.
That sounds interesting. Does anyone have a GitHub link?
I believe I have a good mental model of what git does, but I never remember commands' arguments to use when they are moderately complex. I mean that the commands are not discoverable or easy to memorize.
I don't know if that's because the text UI is bad, or because it's simply difficult to explain with text what to do to manipulate a tree.
Both.
Manipulating complex trees via text is not easy, but the text UI is objectively bad:
https://stevelosh.com/blog/2013/04/git-koans/
I'm not proud of it, but my #1 "Oh shit" git operation is to just delete my local repo, reclone, and reapply the changes. Works really well for me 95% of the time. The rest I ask dev ops guy to help.
I've been using Git for almost 15 years, and have twice built programs/products that use Git internally to achieve certain results (that is, the program/product itself uses Git for things, not just using Git to manage the source code for the program/product) and... sometimes before doing something a little gnarly in Git I'll still just do "cp -R .git ../git-backup" or something like that, so I can replace my entire .git dir with an older copy if I screw it up too bad. It's a ton faster than figuring out the right way to un-fuck any particular operation or set of operations.
Reflog is your friend.
The copy-the-.git-dir trick works for worse issues than can be solved with a single reset --hard. Damn near anything, really, as long as you haven't touched any remotes. It also works if you don't remember/understand how you broke it, where it's broken, or which state you need to try to reset to.
And yet up above we have others recommending to never, ever, use `git reset --hard ...`.
The same people probably want to ban knives!
You're not alone. https://xkcd.com/1597/
This should be a built-in
Or If you’re using git version <= 2.844.Jujutsu has `jj undo`, but which undoes whatever was your last jj command, regardless of what it was. It makes much more confident to do an operation I'm uncertain of. And if I regret something many actions down the line, you have `jj op log` (a better reflog).
Such a simple operation, but it'd probably fix 95% of problems I've had with git.
"Uh oh, I tried to checkout a branch from remote by doing `git checkout origin/some-branch` instead of `git checkout some-branch` and made a couple source changes. Now I'm in detached head state. What is detached head ? I have to stash my revisions? Can I make a new branch with the same name or do I need to delete the origin/some-branch that I'm on?"
When you could be able to just revert the "operation" and check out the correct branch, that's amazing.
If you `jj undo` a second time, does it redo (undoing the undo), or does it back up another step?
It redos, there's discussion about if and how this should change: https://github.com/jj-vcs/jj/issues/3700
For background, this is because the `undo` itself is an operation pushed onto the top of the stack. It is a little counterintuitive.
Silly comment, but:
Every time I see `git reflog`, I see it as re-flog. It's possible that's even the reason I never remember the command, I subconsciously can't bring myself to think of it as "reference log". Instead, it's asking git to sell something cheaply, again.
I have that with fstab
It will always be f-stab in my head, can’t undo.
I'm not a git user, but stuff like this really drives home the idea that "git commit" is meaningless, the only thing that matters is when your commits are pushed or merged.
It's like saving a textfile. Do you write a little message every time you save a file? No that's silly. Just move on.
If I'm saving changes that were done because of a arduous debugging journey and other people are likely to have to refer back to it, yes. In fact, forget little; the smaller the change is, the bigger the text. Some of my changes have 2-3 paragraphs for a 2-3 line change because of the impact.
Same here. If it took me a week to figure out why to tweak a couple lines of code, I'm going to be explaining it.
(Although also/mainly in the comments if it's something I worry someone might accidentally change back later.)
It seems painfully obvious to me that local and remote commits serve different purposes. Local commits are a way to create checkpoints when everything compiles and works and you can move on to the next step. That way you can stash your changes and go back to a working state when you screw things up. Then, before you push those changes, you reset them and split them into proper commits. That way the history is all nice and clean on the remote and it's not just a bunch of "wip"s.
Or you can just squash-merge your PRs and reap both benefits.
I have no pride. I push my dumb commits that chronical my weird journey full of sub-junior mistakes to get to the final state.
I think people would generally have an easier time with git if they didn't try to fix their commit histories and instead just let their past mistakes be known. If you make a bad commit in git the best solution is to follow it up with a good one that fixes the problem. Squash commits on PRs help too.
Even better, `git merge --no-ff` your PRs and use `git log --first-parent` for the simplified "as-if-it-was-squashed" history.
>It's like saving a textfile. Do you write a little message every time you save a file? No that's silly. Just move on.
Do you write a little message about your day every time you go to sleep?
I actually don't, and maybe you don't, but plenty of people do.
I think of the Git revision log as much like that sort of diary, offering the same sorts of advantages. It's more organized than having a separate TODO list document; and it encourages you to describe what you've already done in a clear readable way, too. When you're trying to figure out how far to roll back, it may be useful to understand what you were thinking at the time of the commit. And if something turned out to be the wrong approach, it helps you do the post-mortem.
And, of course: if your unmerged, unpushed work is organized into separate changes that have separate (and labelled goals), and part of that work turns out to be good and part bad, it becomes vastly easier to preserve the good parts.
Well, it is all local until you push so you can do whatever you want.
With that said, it obviously is not meaningless at a technical level because without the commit there is nothing to push or merge. On top of that, at a non-technical level it can be extremely helpful to record some plain-english prose to describe why you are changing something. If you find yourself doing that too often you need to narrow your definition of what constitutes a "change" and/or be more discerning about what you work on simultaneously.
Out of curiosity, if you do not use git, what do you use for version control and change-management?
I actually use git for my todolist/diary and I have an alias for when I want to save which does git commit -m "whatever." Basically I do that so I can view the updated version in the mobile app.
Commit is what causes git to make a copy of the file(s) internally. It's vitally important. But there is no point typing in silly messages like "more fixes" etc. What I do is make an initial commit with something like "(WIP) too feature", then keep doing amend commits until I'm happy, at which point I remove the "(WIP)" from the message.
Related, you can get this as a nice printed zine https://jvns.ca/blog/2018/10/27/new-zine--oh-shit--git-/
One of the beauties of Git is that as long as you’ve created an object, it’s impossible to lose that work (short of nuking the .git directory).
Committing often is key. Precommit hooks (that take more than ~100ms) go against that.
If you orphan the object by not having anything point to it, it goes away when "git gc" is run. That happens automatically after about two weeks by default.
Even things like "git add" will create objects stored in the .git folder.
I have had git corruption problems on a raspberry pi sd card, usually I just had to reclone/abandon that folder
It honestly sounds like git is the least of your problems here...
I can also recommend git flight rules: https://github.com/k88hudson/git-flight-rules
It saved my work a couple of times.
This is why I run Git inside Git, as the latter allows me to undo anything I do within the former.
As a Gitginner I'm wondering if this a good joke that went "wooooosh", or if this has something to do with submodules, or…?
Git manages pretty much everything by using the `.git` folder created by `git init` and there is (as far as I am aware) nothing stopping you from going into that .git folder and running init again there to start using git to manage the internal state of your repository. At least... that is what I assumed the joke was.
Literally `git reflog`
> Only amend commits that only exist in your local copy or you're gonna have a bad time.
"Gonna have a bad time?" I really wish things like this were explained in more detail, rather than with glib warnings that are unhelpful unless you already know what they mean.
The commit you're amending doesn't exist on your copy anymore, despite existing on the remote that you've pushed to.
Warnings about detaching the HEAD in git are so common that they're kind of assumed to be basic knowledge to a lot of people. Explaining why it's bad if you don't already know would take quite a while too.
I do wish git had some form of warning before you rewrite history that's been pushed somewhere. It should already have all the data to know that.
For a developer, one of the most useful things that LLMs can do is help out with Git issues.
It really says something about the design and documentation of a tool when you need a (far more complex and energy-intensive) Artificial Intelligence to be able to use it without making too many mistakes.
Previous discussions:
Oh Shit, Git - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31874308 - June 2022 (232 comments)
Oh Shit Git? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24173238 - Aug 2020 (156 comments)
Oh shit, git (2016) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19906972 - May 2019 (277 comments)
Oh shit, git: Getting myself out of bad situations - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15951825 - Dec 2017 (509 comments)
Oh how I wish more devs would just read the documentation for the tools they pick. I read the git documentation end-to-end. Never really had any issues with it and most commands feels natural to use.
If you memorize the documentation I suppose there's no problem with it, but even then there's confusing things from the beginning design approach.
Like, reset vs revert vs restore, using three similar starting synonyms for different operations.
Reset is particularly confusing because it sounds incredibly destructive, but if you do a soft 'git reset', it just moves the "changes to be committed" to be not staged for the commit.
Then, if you change a single flag (--hard) it is destructive, instead erasing all those changes from your disk.
And there's a reason nobody reads the docs, because they're laid out confusingly at first glance to an unfamiliar person.
If I go to git-scm.com, click docs, the first suggestion is the reference manual. The first guide is on "gitattributes" which gives no philosophy or context as to what it is even used for. Ok, maybe, I'll just check the complete list of git commands... and it starts talking about porcelain and plumbing. Nope, thats not what I need. Maybe try the link "git" under Setup and Config. There the description finally links to a useful "gittutorial" page.
The gittutorial even has some confusing or specific terminology that makes git seem hard. From the beginning of importing a new project "Assume you have a tarball project.tar.gz with your initial work"... why do we need to refer to tar at all, and it doesn't even do the credit of explaining the tar xzf command or what that tarball is. It could easily say 'assume you have a directory', which is the more common case and be 200% more simple.
Before learning magit on emacs, this site saved my ass so many times. After learning magit on emacs, this site saved my ass so many times.
It used to save my ass a lot. It still does, but it used to, too.
Miss that guy.
Avoid `git reset --hard` and `git clean -xfd`. To get a clean working-tree, use `git stash --all`. Allows restoring files if necessary. Saved my sorry bottom multiple times.
Lately I've been asked to avoid merge-commits. They pollute the logs? If my push is blocked I am too far behind I create a new temp branch of master and do a "merge --squash" to it and then a "reset --hard" from temp branch back to my original branch. Heck sometimes I rather keep my changes in patches to void does darn merge CONFLICTS...specially when rebasing.
Hard to understand exactly what your issue is here. Typically when people say "avoid merge commits" they mean they want you to almost always rebase instead of merge. Can you give an example or something?
The thing is if you merge immediately into master and have conflicts, you solve the conflict and only then you can merge. But then the conflict resolution sits at the merge point with a weird default commit message and is hard to decipher.
A nicer way is merge master into your branch, with the rebase option (you can set that option as the default). This will put your changes on top of the master changes that happened during populating your own branch. There you solve any conflicts and those usually immediately show you what happened in the meantime, making it easier to do so. The latest greatest now sits in your branch.
Then as a plus, you can retest that merge and if necessary, fix the merge.
Optionally you can do a pull request for reviewing. The diff the reviewers see is conflict-less and makes sense, has only your changes.
Then simply merge to master, which should be trivial if you don't wait for long.
Merge main into your branch, then merge --no-ff your branch into main. No need to rebase or squash anything.
> Merge main into your branch
The same problem GP was trying to avoid is created here, the merge conflict resolution being on the merge commit.
From memory...
No need to make a temp branch. I know there's probably a more efficient way of doing this, but this is what's stuck in my head.I think that people that think merge commits "pollute the logs" are missing key git features such as `--first-parent`. Git is natively a graph. It gets a lot of powers from that. If you don't want to see all the details of the "subway diagram", add `--first-parent` as a default and focus on the higher level. Merge commits help avoid later conflicts by saving how earlier conflicts were solved. Three-way merging in general and many of git's more complex merging strategies all work better if you save the merge commits. Rebasing throws that baby of information out with the bath water. (It's also useful information to have as a developer needing to archeology dive for how a regression happened. With a merge commit you can see the fingerprints of a bad merge or a mistake that wasn't caught in an ugly merge. With a rebase or squash that information is gone, you have no idea where to find the bad or ugly merges, that data is swept under the rug.)
On top of this, integration is an "interesting" step on its own! When trying to diagnose an issue it can be super valuable to be able to understand whether it was broken from the start or broken by the merge. Rebasing throws all of that valuable information away!
my main use case for LLMs these days is asking it how to (un)do things with git
Other fun git hacks...
* https://hackaday.com/2017/05/23/stupid-git-tricks/
* https://ongardie.net/blog/sqlite-in-git/
Reading these tips confirms that I'm too stoopid to use git.
Fortunately, I don't have to use git. So I just store work-in-progress as time-stamped files. Storage is cheap and plentiful. Can always diff, cherry pick, etc without confusing myself.
Hey I worked with the person who made this! She did a fun presentation for our company.
I swear there used to be a choose your own adventure version of this where you could answer questions about what you did wrong and get a step-by-step "here's what to do" after.
Perhaps it was this one? https://sethrobertson.github.io/GitFixUm/fixup.html
Git is one of those technologies that I never got to wrap my head around of, because in so many ways it doesn't follow intuition and unless you have been using it for a long time, for literally every action you would probably have to Google or use the man page of the command.
As everyone knows, though, Git gets easier once you understand branches are homeomorphic endofunctors mapping submanifolds of a Hilbert space.
> homeomorphic endofunctors mapping submanifolds of a Hilbert space
Has to be easier to understand that then all the arbitrary git commands.
Git commands, while they may be cryptic, actually mean something. Whereas that was just gibberish made by putting random mathematical words together.
(There is a similar sounding joke about category theory, "A monad is just a monoid in the category of endofunctors" but this sentence has a mathematical meaning.)
Unless you’re in a detached HEAD, in which case it’s xylomorphic to the left-aligned Galois group of R^3.
That's the Darcs joke and you told it somewhat incorrectly.
Oh geez now that clarifies everything, how could I miss that?
Did you start with Git or have you used other VCS systems before? I started with SVN and then coming to Git, there were obviously things to learn about how it was different but honestly it felt to me like it made things easier in many ways (since I'd experienced the horror of a very large codebase in SVN with lots of branches, and trying to track those and merge back together - git is so much better at that, it's crazy)...
I can see how it would be a much bigger learning curve if people come straight to git, but it's still hard for me to understand where the blocker is that so many people complain about using it...
I was trying to delete a file from history yesterday.
The built in way (filter-branch) pops up a warning, with a long delay, saying you should hit Control+C and go download a third party python script called filter-repo...
Possibly consider that "deleting a file from history" is rather far outside the norm or recommended practice for git (even though it is, of course, entirely possible)
> even though it is, of course, entirely possible
I take the more realistic perspective: until git makes it impossible to commit something that shouldn't have been, like a secret, then deleting a file from history is a fundamental requirement of git.
Even if you purge the history, the secret is compromised and you should stop using it. It's moot whether or not you're able to remove it from history.
That's, for secrets. Secrets aren't the only thing one might want to remove retroactively.
The designers of git clearly disagreed, as you can guess from its design, so it's not surprising it might feel like a bit of an uphill struggle (and will probably remain so). There are other tools available.
It's ok mate. Hackernews says we should be using jj to manage our rewritten-in-Rust code.
Since you brought it up, I personally switched to jujutsu and prefer it greatly. I regularly help coworkers deal with issues in git and keep dropping hints like `in jujutsu this would've been done way easier like this!`. Nobody bites yet since I think most of them don't want to use the CLI but maybe someday if enough people keep talking about it the inertia will get to the point that we can get some really slick GUIs for jj.
Haha, I'm so glad I didn't fall for the whole rust thing.
Both you and GP, please aim higher for comments on HN.
I force pushed over origin/master from a very not-up-to-date feature branch and don't have the remote history I overwrote fetched locally.
My hot take is that Git isn't nearly as hard as the endless blogs pretend.
"hard"? it is not hard, it is just poorly designed, the API (commands) are really terrible.
Think of it: one person who cares about UX decades ago could make git 10 times more sane for milions of devs.
I'm happy I didn't have to scroll too far to see this.
Git's CLI isn't elegant, but it really isn't that big of a deal if you understand the basics of what a commit is, what a branch is etc.
I struggle to understand why so many devs decide to treat it like mysterious arcane sorcery instead of just spending the needed time on learning how it works.
The same can be said about regexes.
Regexes and git are probably the two tools which I have benefitted the most from learning compared to how little time I've spend on learning them - and I wouldn't even consider myself an expert on either.
> it really isn't that big of a deal if you understand the basics of what a commit is, what a branch is etc.
Yes, that's what people mean when they say that git is hard. Instead of presenting you with an interface expressed in terms of the domain you intend to work in, whose commands represent the tasks you intend to perform, git dumps its guts all over the place and requires each user to re-implement the interface between "what you want to do" and "how git is built" inside their own brains instead. Once you have written git's missing user interface in your brain, you are fine; but that's a lot of work which is not necessary with other version-control systems.
>I struggle to understand why so many devs decide to treat it like mysterious arcane sorcery instead of just spending the needed time on learning how it works.
For example: you have bazilion ways to achieve the same thing, all of them having its own quirks/advantages?
It is just poorly designed, that's it, lol.
I like to joke that if somebody else invented Git, then it'd be 10% less powerful, but 10 times more user-friendly
But any software evolves over time so if it had fewer ways of doing things in the past, it would very likely eventually pick them up because people have use cases for the advanced features.
It's like complaining about languages ("English is hard to spell and doesn't have consistent pronunciation" etc.), they're constantly changing and that kind of thing is going to happen eventually...
Git is a technology that was invented to simplify things that ended up getting so complex over time that an entire industry started up around it to try to make it simple again.
See also: Docker. Probably lots of others.
Actually, no. Git was a technology invented specifically to enable Linux kernel development. It hasn't become any more complex since its inception. The problem is most people aren't doing kernel development and have absolutely no idea what a distributed version control system is, yet they use git, a distributed version control system. I have no idea why we use it, to be honest, but I'm very glad that we do because the previous options were crap. Perhaps Mercurial is better, but git is good enough.
We were using svn before Git and easy cloning (and then PRs) has solved a LOT of problems. There are definitely still some things left to improve, though.
Love that the very first thing mentions reflog, arguably the most confusing and complicated git feature.
The rest are good though.
I just use cursor agent to do git now (unless it’s simple stuff)
The one thing I wish people would internalise about git is it's an append only data store. To get work into the store, you commit it. Once in the store there is not a command in git that can remove it.
This is how the reflog works. Whatever you do, you can get back to a previous branch state and restore the work from the data store.
But git can't help you if you don't commit. So just commit. Commit all the time. If you think it's too much overhead and you always forget to commit, fix your tools. If you're writing code all day you should be committing at a minimum every hour, in general.
I love this site, it helped me and it also funny. Kudos to the creator!
Oh shit, I accidentally `git reset HEAD~1` and moved the last commit to file diffs, which was a merge to master, and my file diff now is both the last branch merge and everything I've done in the last 8hrs. I did this once and it was a gigantic PITA to undo, if anyone has any hot tips for that particular idiocy...
`git reset` again to move to the right commit
Unable to access this. Might be hugged to death
https://archive.is/qXlY7
8 years of posting this
this is good but is extremely reddit
github's "reflog" is the activity log API https://docs.github.com/en/rest/activity?apiVersion=2022-11-...
Useful in case someone force-pushes and no one has the good ref locally.
Is this related to "Oh Shit, git?" by Julia Evans?
https://wizardzines.com/zines/oh-shit-git/
Perhaps not and the authors just named it the same because it rolls off the tongue nicely.
Yes! Katie and I made it into a zine because I was such a huge fan of her work on https://ohshitgit.com/. (you'll notice she's a coauthor of the zine)
Pro tip: Sometimes it's easier to rewrite you're entire app rather than wrestle with git commands. /s
Yeah, please don't create sites like this. Just... don't.
Any, and I mean any "in case of a Git problem, just do this" recipe is wrong, often in very subtle ways. So, my advice: in case of a Git problem, contact the help channel provided by the organization hosting your Git repository. They'll help you out! And if it's your personal-I-am-truly-the-only-human-using-this repository? Just recreate it, and save yourself the pain.
Source: I'm part of the team behind the #githelp channel in many $DAYJOBs, and we know how hard things are. You committed an unencrypted password file, or worse, your entire 'secret' MP4 collection to our monorepo? Sure, just let us know! Pushed your experimental branch to master/main/head/whatever? We'll fix it!
Just don't ever, for whatever reason, run that-chain-of-commands you found on the Internet, without understanding what they do! In most cases, your initial mistake can be undone pretty quickly (despite requiring nonstandard tooling), but once you're three levels deep and four days later, not so much...
I've been using git for at least 6 years now, maybe 10.
Sites like this are a great aid to remembering how to deal with certain situations. And yes, I understand what the commands do, but that doesn't mean I always could, or always want to, put together the series of steps from scratch.
And also, we self-host our own gitea hosting because we're not getting sucked down by yet another hosting debacle (old enough to have suffered under sourceforge, and don't plan on getting in the same situation again). For git hosting just as much as everything else on line, if you're not paying for it, you're not the customer.
> For git hosting just as much as everything else on line, if you're not paying for it, you're not the customer.
Yeah, lovely trope, but I'm literally talking about organizations hosting their Git repos on a file share here.
Why would you ask employees of a file hosting service about how to use git?
We’re not all working at $bigcorp with dedicated help teams. Sites like this are great and have helped me many times!
What happens when you are the help team and it's the first time something goes wrong?
A 'team', by definition, consists of more people than 'you.'
And, by the time a '#githelp team' is formed, it's to address patterns to which there are known solutions.
One of the many problems with Git, is that these solutions depend very, very much on the structure of the repo and the common practices of its users.
So, instead of executing random commands from the Internet, just ask. Please! Or, if there's truly nobody going to be around, give in and recreate the repo. You'll save yourself so much pain in the long run...
> A 'team', by definition, consists of more people than 'you.'
I'm the resident git expert, but not by choice. There's more that I don't know than that I do. It's not uncommon that I need to use internet recipes to un-wedge someone's clone.
> Or, if there's truly nobody going to be around, give in and recreate the repo. You'll save yourself so much pain in the long run...
This is insane. There are a dozen other people using the remote, not to mention a whole CI/CD build configuration.
OK, so you've truly screwed up your your personal/small-team repos to the point of requiring poorly-understood command sequences from the Notoriously Reliable Internet more than once?
I applaud you for your honesty, but... Really?
I don't understand your surprise or disbelief. I would imagine most devs have been there. As evidence: just look at Stack Overflow, and compare it to what it's apparently intended to look like and how it's supposed to work (as a denizen of meta.stackoverflow.com I am quite familiar with this struggle).
Bro, really, self-taught people with a bare minimum understanding of the tools they use are super normal, and when they get into a pit they have to fix it themselves.
Although to your point folks would be better served carefully reading the docs / git book than googling a specific solution to their specific error code.
For me, the value of things like this is in learning the terminology for what I broke and how to fix it. I'm not going to copy-and-paste advice off the Internet. I never have. It's still super helpful to see "oh, that thing I want to do is called frobnitzing the corple. Now I know what to Google!"
Yes. I think the ratio of small-team repos this describes is close to 100%. You seem to have a certain idea of how repos are managed. I don't think it's very representative of reality.
Recipes like these aren't useless, but yes, they really need to be prefixed with whether they expect to start from a clean work tree and empty staging area. Or describe what they'll do to uncommitted changes, both staged & unstaged. Otherwise they pose a substantial risk of making the problem worse.
> "... or worse, your entire 'secret' MP4 collection to our monorepo?"
Oh no, that poor soul...
This is old school. No switch or restore here.