Git cheat sheet [pdf]

https://wizardzines.com/git-cheat-sheet.pdf

by tambourine_man • 2 years ago

328 143 2 years ago

wizardzines.com

tiffanyh• 2 years ago

Is there a historical reason why git is needlessly complex?

Seeing this cheat sheet really brings it to life.

jimbob45• 2 years ago

Because Linus had more clout in the SE industry than anyone else and said “SVN bad” and nobody wanted to do enough research to disprove him so here we are.

Merging in Subversion is a complete disaster. The Subversion people kind of acknowledge this and they have a plan and their plan sucks, too. It is incredible how stupid these people are.

So for example, let's go back to one of the things where I think the designers of Subversion were complete morons. Strong opinions. That's me, right? There's a few of them in the room today, I suspect. You're stupid. (Crowd laughs)

Nobody is interest in branching. Branches are completely useless unless you merge them.

https://sandeep.ramgolam.com/blog/linus-torvalds-talks-about...

fragmede4• 2 years ago

It's not needlessly complex. The workflow it was created to support is inordinately complex, and the target market for that is highly technical, so its complexity was not the issue. Kernel developers needed to communicate to other kernel developers in a decentralized manner, and needed to work on top of each other. How do you work on a project where there are 15,000 people writing code? Git was created for this purpose.

It's as complex as it needs to be to support the workflows it was designed to be. A dumber tool would be easy to create, but then it would not be able to support more complex workflows like linux kernel development. So it's not needlessly complex, though it is more complex than it needs to be for simple use cases.

For those needing a less complicated frontend, there's a large number of them to make it easier to interact with git. For people that aren't full-time software developers, I don't recommend using git directly. However for those that are, it's worth taking the time to understand the underlying concepts so git becomes something you understand because once you do, it's quite elegant for what it does. I'm not going to gatekeep being a software developer on whether or not you know git, but if figuring out for yourself how such a fundamental system works doesn't give you a release of dopamine, this might not be your kind of thing. Which is totally fine. There are tons of things that are and aren't my thing.

I recommend https://learngitbranching.js.org for learning how to navigate around git.

but of course, https://xkcd.com/1597/ applies as well.

Zambyte6• 2 years ago

After learning Jujutsu, I realized this is really wrong. The underlying data structures and operations are great, and they serve their purposes really well (such as supporting 10k+ people collaborating like you mentioned). They are what makes git great. The git command line interface is a needlessly complex abstraction on top of them that tries to encourage certain behaviors, but does a really bad job at it.

shadowgovt• 2 years ago

"Needlessly" can be in the eye of the beholder, but given that Linus basically put it together to solve the problem he was trying to solve without consulting a UX team or building a product for the ages, I would be willing to place my probability bar pretty high on the design tilting towards "One person's best idea right now" over "Best design theoretically possible."

That having been said, the team is really good at engines so the software is quite good at doing what it's supposed to do.

eviks2• 2 years ago

WCan you give at least a few examples of complex operations that only arise at the scale of thousands of people?

wsc981• 2 years ago

I think most of the time you’d be ok just knowing a couple of git commands (log, add, commit, pull, push, ..?). And of course there’s also GUI tools.

I don’t think git is that complex for most workflows to be honest. But there is a lot of power that is available if the need arises.

vrinsd6• 2 years ago

Yes. Because git was created by Linus Torvalds specifically to enable and advance Linux kernel development.

The fact it has become so widly adopted is a "happy accident" (or misery). Github I think has been widely credited with making git so common place ("free git hosting") but I don't think git is the "ideal" revision control system for many projects.

Because it was made for Linus for Linus/Linux, this is why the terminology and sometimes workflow is backwards from every other "normal" version control system. A "Pull Request" (PR) is named that because for Linux development Linus/maintainers would PULL changes into Linux kernel tree. In almost every other version control system it's called a Merge Request which logically makes MUCH more sense because you are merging a change (where ever it came from) into a tree.

Git was (still?) the only open-source distributed version control system that could handle enormous code bases with good speed which means it gained a lot of inertia at big companies as well.

I vastly prefer and use Mercurial for personal projects but if you have tried to use Hg on huge code bases (I've tried on Android AOSP) it really chokes. Mercurial got the "user interface" and command-set right and has some nifty features (being able to launch a web server on the fly to get a tree view of your changes) but being written in Python, performance and scalability aren't ideal.

8n4vidtmkvmk• 2 years ago

There's a C version of hg, and more recently a rust version. I can't say how much faster they are though

wakawaka285• 2 years ago

Mercurial got the "user interface" and command-set right and has some nifty features (being able to launch a web server on the fly to get a tree view of your changes) but being written in Python, performance and scalability aren't ideal.

I used to think Mercurial had a better UI but I changed my mind after taking the time to understand Git. Mercurial does have nifty features but Git's way of working isn't hard or especially counterintuitive. You must learn the terminology to properly understand it, but after that it's smooth sailing. Git actually has fewer moving parts than Mercurial, as there are less extraneous features. Instead of 3 or more categories of "branch-like" graph structures like Mercurial, you get branches as refs in Git. Every named leaf in the commit graph is a branch or a tag, and those have simple properties. There are surely git plugins to add more metadata but you don't really need that.

Git too has a web interface by default: https://git-scm.com/docs/gitweb Of course there are many Github-like solutions specifically catered to hosting repos and entire project workflows with Git too.

guenthert2• 2 years ago

It might also help understanding, when talking about the history of git, to keep in mind that it came to be out of the urgent need for a tool to replace (then still proprietary) BitKeeper. I wouldn't say that bk is as hard to grok as git, but it's certainly complex as well. I wonder if some of git's idiosyncrasies are a result of intentionally avoiding a look&feel equivalent to bk lest that would alienate Mr. McVoy.

sam_bristow• 2 years ago

Some of the complexity comes from the fact that in earlier versions it was reasonably expensive to add new subcommands. As a result more functionality got added to existing subcommands like git checkout. This made the UX more confusing.

In newer versions of git the cost of adding new subcommands is reduced and they've started adding more specific commands like git switch.

tambourine_man• 2 years ago

Why was that?

marssaxman• 2 years ago

The addition of `switch` and `restore` has probably reduced my daily cursing-at-git rate by half.

tasuki2• 2 years ago

Git is not complex. Its UI is!

Git is very simple. It is built on just four concepts: blobs, trees, commits, refs.

eviks2• 2 years ago

Because good UI design requires a different skill and takes extra effort to achieve, so it's most often just ignored

thecrims0nchin2• 2 years ago

I liked the way I learned git. I started with sourcetree, a third party git gui. Super simple to use and understand. Then I moved to git gui, this step could be skipped. Then I got tired of pulling up my UIs and learned the terminal commands. Highly suggest this for anyone new, but just my (n=1) experience.

SoftTalker2• 2 years ago

All I know of git is clone, pull, commit, and push. That’s all I’ve ever needed. Git can be that simple. Of course it supports more complex uses, which you can learn if you need them.

lacedeconstruct• 2 years ago

Life is simple until we play with time, once you start altering the past everything falls apart

yxre• 2 years ago

The use case for more is managing the history of it in a specific way to make it easier to understand. Most applications don't need this level of management since most applications don't have lives depending on them

bun_terminator• 2 years ago

And that's the only reasonable subset of git there is - I agree. Branches and cherry picks aren't worth the insurmountable headaches they come with

joseda-hg• 2 years ago

I'd add Stash, unless I'm working alone

therealdrag0• 2 years ago

Btw I moved from Sourcetree to Fork. It’s very similar but way more performant and smooth UI (unless ST has improved in last few years)

nozzlegear• 2 years ago

I love Fork, one of my favorite macOS apps. I wish I could get it on my iPad as well.

dryanau• 2 years ago

I like GitKraken, except for the fact that it lacks the ability to show first parent only, i.e. `git log --first-parent`. That feature is available in Visual Studio and Visual Studio Code (Git Graph extension), but I don't like these as much as GitKraken, so I end up switching between command line, GitKraken and VS/Code. It's a bit of a mess. Does Fork support `--first-parent`? It's especially hand in merge-heavy workflows with very noodly graphs that you want to simplify.

thecrims0nchin2• 2 years ago

Thank you! Had never heard of this. Ill give it a try!

Barrin92• 2 years ago

Then I got tired of pulling up my UIs and learned the terminal commands

I'd never revert to terminal commands. Git is basically begging to be interfaced with through a GUI given how much sense it makes to visualize a git repo and its workflows. The moment I started using Magit git started to make sense for me.

jjayj• 2 years ago

lazygit is a godsend, personally. `git add`ing individual files is a PITA.

toinebeg• 2 years ago

I had kind of the same path but with GitKraken and Sublime Merge but I kept Sublime Merge around as it ease complex interactions too.

I have only praise for Sublime Merge.

ruraljuror• 2 years ago

Love this. I would add:

  git commit —-fixup $COMMIT_ID

combined with

  git rebase -i upstream/master —autosquash

These have become staples of my recent workflow. Julia’s example uses HEAD^^^^^ to rebase the previous 5 commits. I have been doing this as HEAD~5, until recently I realized you can just rebase all commits up to the upstream HEAD.

lathiat• 2 years ago

I only recently learnt this one, it's great for working with stacked patches in gerrit.

mwpmaybe• 2 years ago

Ahh, thank you:

    git commit —-fixup $COMMIT_ID

I'm adopting this immediately. I always make little "oops <topic>" commits like "oops GET users/me" and then manually move and fixup them on my next interactive rebase. This is much better!

behnamoh• 2 years ago

Are there git alternatives that aren't a PITA to master before one can use them in production?

vrinsd6• 2 years ago

Mercurial if you're not on a huge code base. While the core command-line hg works great, GUIs and third-party programs are kind of lacking.

Atlassian Sourcetree in theory works with Hg (because Atlassian's Bitbucket used Mercurial as their primary version control system before moving to git) but SourceTree is Windows/Mac only, there is no Linux version for some strange reason.

Trying to run SourceTree on Linux via WINE fails because Sourcetree can't be installed with the 'Administrator' user and recent WINE releases have (accidentally?) removed the ability to run a WINE program as a non-Administrator user.

I haven't personally tried (yet) to install Sourcetree on a Windows machine and copy the directory over and try via WINE, but it's on my list to do.

vrinsd6• 2 years ago

This whole thread got me to go back and see what else is out there and I remembered there's another (potentially) saner choice: Fossil : https://www.fossil-scm.org/home/doc/trunk/www/index.wiki

I haven't used it myself but I might for a solo project I'm involved in right now.

A good read (not my article, linked from the Fossil site):

https://wholesomedonut.prose.sh/using-fossil-not-git

cjensen2• 2 years ago

Subversion. It was made by CVS maintainers and a lot of care and thought was put into how it works and how the commands work and what the names of the commands are. Subversion is limited in being an older model of version control where there is exactly one single source of truth.

In my mind Git solves a different problem that Linus Torvalds was facing: many people working in parallel with only some of the ideas pushed upstream, but many people wanting to make changes and easily being able to move forward to the latest changes from upstream.

My extremely opinionated view is that most people should use Subversion unless they have a very complicated team structure. And that means every solo dev working by themselves should not complicate their own lives by using Git unless they are really comfortable with it already.

erik_seaberg4• 2 years ago

Git is well worth learning for any kind of collaboration or speculative work. It's fundamentally better at resolving merge conflicts, because it doesn't rely on being informed about which files may have been moved or copied. The Subversion maintainers owe me days of effort salvaging my small team's branches.

tasuki2• 2 years ago

I have just the opposite view of yours! Subversion is so so complex. It requires a client and a server. It might have a nice UI, but its internals are a mess. Just the opposite of git!

Why would a solo dev choose to use a client-server version control instead of one that works fully locally?

abenga• 2 years ago

A small, simple subset of git? You generally don't need all the esoteric stuff people complain about day-to-day.

Pretty much what is listed in the OP cheat sheet.

sunshowers• 2 years ago

Jujutsu! Git-compatible and a generational leap in source control that most people are going to love.

As a former member of Meta's source control team, I believe this with pretty high confidence -- many of the workflows that we rolled out within Mercurial/Sapling, and caused it to consistently be the most loved developer tool at Meta for many years based on surveys and interviews, have been adopted and improved by Jujutsu. See my testimonial, the first one at [2].

[1] https://martinvonz.github.io/jj

[2] https://martinvonz.github.io/jj/latest/testimonials

(Disclosure: I'm obviously biased towards the Jujutsu workflows, and its creator and I worked together on Mercurial. But I like to think that this specific belief of mine is pretty data-driven, both via stated and revealed preference.)

majoe• 2 years ago

git is now so ubiquitous in software development, that it's hard to justify learning another version control system. You're probably better off learning the core concepts and using the most common git commands through some GUI.

mariocesar• 2 years ago

I didn't know about `git add -p`. Really useful!

  -p, --patch
  Interactively choose hunks of patch between the index and the work tree and add them to the index. This gives the user a chance to review the difference before adding modified contents to the index.

Fellshard• 2 years ago

I always custom-select hunks of my current work to assemble into coherent commits, where possible. I find it really helps me to rearrange the work I've done in my head in such a way that if I needed to walk someone through it, I could do so by walking the commit line.

nomilk2• 2 years ago

A couple of hidden gems:

git diff --staged (shows the diff between the last commit and what you've got staged, great when what you're staging is finicky, lets you double check that you have precisely the files/hunks you intended)

git log <file> (git log, but for just commits where <file> was touched; saves pilfering through all of git log, especially useful when the file only gets modified infrequently)

Random tip: when using git add --patch, try the 'e' option if you need more nuance than the hunks git provides (it contains instructions for how to ex/include individual lines, so you don't have to remember how to do it).

omginternets• 2 years ago

15 years… 15 years to discover git diff --staged !

neoecos• 2 years ago

I don't consider myself a git savvy person, but the help gives output, and I think this command is used a lot

m0zzie• 2 years ago

Wow, TIL `git diff --staged` exists and is an alias to `git diff --cached`, which I have used for many years. "staged" certainly feels more intuitive, but will I ever be able to undo this muscle memory?!

anbotero• 2 years ago

Same here. Just make it an alias: ds.

I’m using git dc, but it seems ds may be my new one, haha.

Falimonda• 2 years ago

I find aliasing a lot of these saves me a good chunk of time and reduces the barrier to better organize my work.

In case anyone cares to browse or suggest their own: https://gitlab.com/Falimonda/gitrc

NobodyNada• 2 years ago

git diff --staged (shows the diff between the last commit and what you've got staged, great when what you're staging is finicky, lets you double check that you have precisely the files/hunks you intended)

If you set `git config --global commit.verbose true`, then Git will automatically include this diff in the comment section of the commit message editor.

ChrisMarshallNY• 2 years ago

She delivers, yet again.

Thanks!

johnwheeler• 2 years ago

I'll say it aloud: People need to drop git and look at JJ

https://martinvonz.github.io/jj/v0.17.1/

I think even Linus thinks git has a shitty UI. JJ has an amazing workflow.

pixelesque• 2 years ago

Going to have to disagree on the lack of an index: I can see workflows where that's simpler, but I'm so used to that now with git (for better or worse) I'm imagining that'd be a pretty big workflow change for me...

Other than playing around with it, I haven't really used it in anger though, so...

jmercouris• 2 years ago

If you aren't already, you can also try Magit. It really helps one master and interact with Git.

Panzer042• 2 years ago

I always find it interesting how knowledge makes it hard to comprehend the difficulties other people have. I used to barely understand git, but after a couple of years working at a company that relies on a rebase workflow, I'd like to think I largely understand how it works. Its nice to recognise pretty much every operation on this cheatsheet.

Is it common that developers still have issues with git after using it professionally for a couple of years? Admittedly, I still have trouble remembering the commands to do what I want (hello, rebase --onto A B C), though :P.

nomilk2• 2 years ago

knowledge makes it hard to comprehend the difficulties other people have

The phenomena you describe is known as the Curse of Knowledge [1]

Wikipedia gives an example: A knowledgeable professor might no longer remember the difficulties that a young student encounters when learning a new subject for the first time. [2]

[1] https://academia.stackexchange.com/q/163747/132074

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curse_of_knowledge

acjohnson55• 2 years ago

The skillset to navigate this is one of the underappreciated challenges of teaching.

sirentdiver• 2 years ago

Admittedly, I still have trouble remembering the commands to do what I want (hello, rebase --onto A B C), though :P.

I work at a company where every developer uses Sourcetree, a GUI for Git. I don't really have a need to remember Git commands (and what arguments they take) anymore after using a GUI. For me, it is sufficient to know what Git commands do without knowing the semantics.

dtgriscom• 2 years ago

I always use SmartGit, another GUI. (I've lauded it to all and sundry, but have yet to inspire a new devotee...)

jacobrussell• 2 years ago

I can do git pull, branch, add, commit, push, merge, diff, status, stash pretty much without thinking but much beyond that I have to look it up.

xeonmc• 2 years ago

I always find it interesting how knowledge makes it hard to comprehend the difficulties other people have.

Once the mind had bootstrapped itself to a concept, it is very hard to empathize with your past self unless you took cares to document the difficulties while still in the confused state, articulating as much detail and as many fallacies encountered as possible.

I always liken it to Wittgenstein's analogy -- don't throw away the ladder after having climbed up upon it!

smusamashah2• 2 years ago

I understand the commonly used core concepts of git pretty well, and using that knowledge, I can do exactly what I want using Git GUIs (IntelliJ these days). With CLI I can do pulls and commits at most.

pacoverdi• 2 years ago

IntelliJ has become pretty powerful with Git these days.

Squashing, dropping commits, rebasing. Even interactive rebase can be done in a few clicks.

I sometimes pop up IDEA to do some non-trivial cleanup in a repo. Even if relatively fluent with the command line, it saves me a lot of time.

CSMastermind• 2 years ago

Is it common that developers still have issues with git after using it professionally for a couple of years?

As someone who has worked on developer tooling, including building a custom git client at a former job - yes.

Most people learn a few specific workflows not conceptually how things work under the hood.

Visual editors like GitKraken, Submlime Merge, Sourcetree, etc, have made this much better but there's still a big gap.

PhilipRoman2• 2 years ago

I can confirm the part about rebase workflow, it really forces you to understand the git model. I sincerely recommend every dev to try it at least once. It also got me into custom power tools for git, like incremental rebase, dual blame, etc.

PhilipRoman2• 2 years ago

Too late to edit but I just realized we probably mean very different things by "rebase workflow". I meant making extensive use of Git history editing even on public branches, (with tags serving as backup). I guess the common meaning of "rebase workflow" is just using rebase instead of merge.

vrinsd6• 2 years ago

A version control tool shouldn't take YEARS of usage to be productive, to me that's a red flag. Some engineering tools are just complex because what we're doing might need that flexability so the tools provide a myraid of options or workflows.

But writing software, tracking your changes, being able to back out your changes and getting your changes integrated into a code base should be as low activation energy as possible to be productive.

But again, git wasn't created for "you and me", it was created by one guy for his project, the fact "mere mortals" are using it is kind of our fault.

codenlearn• 2 years ago

the one thing that is handy and missing here is creating and pushing tags.

ashconnor• 2 years ago

squash the last 5 commits into one: `git rebase -i HEAD^^^^^^`

Shouldn't this be: `git rebase -i HEAD~5` ?

Assuming you only want to rebase linear history.

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/2221658/whats-the-differ...

wyldfire• 2 years ago

The biggest eye opener for me is understanding that all those commits are "still in there". Tags and branches merely point to a commit and the commit that branch used to apply to isn't gone.

Many (probably fair to say "nearly all"?) commands will be non destructive in that you can easily refer to older incarnations of your branch.

I'd seen "git reflog" but mostly used it to remind me of "that branch I worked on a while ago".

I gained a semi-healthy fear of operations that could land me in the middle of a conflict resolution that I wasn't interested in handling right now (often because the conflict occurred because I was referring to the wrong commit/branch).

I haven't completely cured that fear but at least I feel pretty comfortable recovering any old work among rebases, etc.

Zambyte6• 2 years ago

Jujutsu has 100% cured me of those exact fears. Here are some ways I deal with them:

- I don't know if there will be conflicts when after some operation. I just do the operation and see what happens. If there are conflicts, I either deal with them, undo the operation that caused the conflict, or make a me commit somewhere else, leaving the conflict to be dealt with later.

- I know there is going to be a conflict. In this case I may duplicate the related branches and either try to reconcile them ahead of time, or try to do the conflicting operating and walk through resolving it. If the conflict resolution gets gnarly, I can either undo portions of the resolution and keep trying, put it off and do something else for some time, or abandon the whole tree.

iamcreasy• 2 years ago

git reset HEAD is nifty way to unstage everything! Really cool!

_blz2• 2 years ago

Read once here, the best cheat sheet is one you create yourself. In my case, with fish shell or bash history search with fzf, I've effectively created a cheat sheet of commands I frequently tend to use with working examples. Seems to be working for me so far.

pncnmnp2• 2 years ago

I have a funny little habit that probably stems from a certain degree of paranoia when working on a decent-sized change. I like to keep a local patch of it, as follows: "git diff > works.patch"

Later on, you can apply it if necessary with "git apply works.patch".

erik_seaberg4• 2 years ago

Do you find that better than a stash or a branch because it shows up in ls?

pncnmnp2• 2 years ago

Yes, it can be nice as an archival thing. Keep a directory filled with experimental patches you made to certain parts of your code. Maybe branches are better for certain use cases.

I use stash too, but for different purposes. For instance, when I'd like to quickly change branches to fix a bug/issue and then come back to my stuff. Sometimes, I use stash for resolving potentially complicated pre-commit merges as well.

BossingAround• 2 years ago

You could use stash for just that use case (even multiple times to make multiple "patches").

For a more robuts method, you could also just commit (without pushing of course). Then, you can do "git reset --hard HEAD~1", and you have a pre-patch env ready for more work. When you need to re-do your commit, you can check reflog to get the ID.

Either way is, to me, an easier way to achieve the same result as patches.

puddingvlaai• 2 years ago

Instead of looking up the commit hash in your reflog, you could also just create a branch on that commit and refer to the commit with the branch name.

1000100_1000101• 2 years ago

One of faves isn't listed.

  git log -LstartLine,endLine:fileName

It's like an extended git blame, showing how the specified lines evolved over time, and by who. Tracks the change as the line numbers evolve, and even as the file is moved.

Answers the questions of "who did this, when, and why?" / "How long has it been like that?", etc.

lordmoma• 2 years ago

this is a better one: https://medium.com/@lordmoma/so-you-think-you-know-git-673f9...

AnonC• 2 years ago

Unfortunately, this requires creating a Medium account and signing in. Maybe it also requires payment later on.

This is the message I see.

The author made this story available to Medium members only.
If you’re new to Medium, create a new account to read this story on us.

SushiHippie• 2 years ago

Non login-walled link:

https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:https:...

rezonant• 2 years ago

One thing missing that I use all the time, "git cherry". Without arguments it will show you what commits in your local branch are not in your remote tracking branch. Use "git cherry <ref>" to list the commits in the current branch that are not in the given ref.

Most simple use is to know what you are about to push. Second use case is getting a commit list for release notes when using deployment/promotion branches.

Super useful, I thought everyone used it but maybe some don't know!

shmerl• 2 years ago

For listing branches, git branch -vv gives some more info.

abalone• 2 years ago

This is great, especially the little diagrams which help illustrate rebasing vs merging, one of the tricker parts of the git learning curve.

Having said that I think it could more clearly state the author's typical preferred practice for updating a branch and integrating it with main when you're done. There's a few techniques listed for diverged branches, but then fast-forward merge is in its own box and it's not super clear how you might use working-branch rebasing with it to eliminate divergences in the first place (even though it's hinted at under "pull changes").

I wonder if it would be clearer to say something like "combining branches: rebase your branch and do a (FF) merge, optionally with squashing," or however they like to do it.

koito17• 2 years ago

Cool cheat sheet, especially because it covers common use cases. But practically everything covered here I was able to learn independently with Magit. It's also much easier to press one or two keys in the magit-status buffer than to open a terminal and manually type git commands, so I pretty much never use the git CLI directly, not even for a clone.

wodenokoto2• 2 years ago

But it requires you to learn emacs. I thought I could just apt-get emacs and then from there do something to the effect of "install magit" and have a easy to use interface to git.

I half a day later I gave up. Never got to install magit.

noman-land• 2 years ago

I had this exact experience trying to install Common Lisp. Installed emacs and wtfed out of there 30 min later having learned nothing and feeling slightly traumatized.

plowjockey• 2 years ago

I am just the opposite. I started using Git not long after it gained traction outside of the kernel project. Of course, it was primarily geared toward working in the terminal then. Some years later I had switched to Emacs and gave Magit a whirl. Even after going through quite a bit of its copious documentation, I just never felt comfortable with it. I guess I don't like being that far removed from the actual goings on with the repository.

I've since switched to Vim and happily use git at the terminal prompt. I doubt that will ever change as the interactive interface of various Git commands has improved.

redbell• 2 years ago

"There are only two hard things in Computer Science: cache invalidation and naming things." - Phil Karlton [0]

Based on the above statement, I find it extremely weird to see such git command named "blame", then I realized I'm not the only one:

What does 'git blame' do? [1].

Blame someone else for your bad code [2].

Git blame should be called git credit [3].

Does Git Blame sound too negative? [4].

______________________________

0. https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/19836/has-phil-...

1. https://stackoverflow.com/questions/31203001/what-does-git-b...

2. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27963868

3. https://dev.to/damcosset/git-blame-should-be-called-git-cred...

4. https://www.reddit.com/r/ProgrammerHumor/comments/r5lzyo/doe...

leipert• 2 years ago

I think a better name would be “git praise”

petepete• 2 years ago

I'm sure you know this, but for younger readers, in Subversion 'praise' was an alias for 'blame'.

For neutrality, 'annotate’ was another alias.

omoikane• 2 years ago

One advantage that "git blame" has over possible alternatives such as "git credit", "git author", or "git praise", is that it's one character shorter and maybe faster to type.

For the same number of characters, I have heard of "git glory" as a possible alternative.

TiredOfLife• 2 years ago

and off-by-one errors.

Wowfunhappy• 2 years ago

I think `blame` is on-brand for a tool called `git`.

looshch2• 2 years ago

agreed, i renamed [1] it to ‘who’ (well, actually it’s just ‘w’ since i’m a vim-diehard)

[1] https://github.com/looshch/configs/blob/master/.gitconfig#L1...

KennyBlanken• 2 years ago

These cheat sheets are a great idea spoiled somewhat by the use of an infuriatingly annoying-to-read font.

If your mission is to make hard topics easier to understand, why are you using a hard-to-read font whose only purpose is to make the cheat sheet look folksy?

wodenokoto2• 2 years ago

Find every commit that added or removed some text git log -S banana

I literally spend half an hour the other day having an argument with chatGPT about how I could find versions of a file that contained a specific string. Guess I should have asked for commits and not versions of files.

kzrdude• 2 years ago

git log -G is much more often what I want - diff contains some text but doesn't necessarily add or remove it.

Dban1• 2 years ago

git fetch origin <branch_name>:<branch_name>

to update a branch while you're on another branch

timvisee• 2 years ago

`git rebase --onto FIRST_ID^ NEW_PARENT`

is also super powerful to put a series of commits on top of a new parent when history has changed.

That happens with PRs and squash merges quite often.

https://stackoverflow.com/a/29916361/1000145

thefz• 2 years ago

Julia Evans' content is always high quality.

rswail• 2 years ago

Git has its quirks, but the underlying model is good.

There's some naming problems, like I just had to explain lightweight tags vs annotated ones to some newbies.

The lightweight ones should have had a different name, like "bookmarks" or something.

incognito124• 2 years ago

Try JJ: https://github.com/martinvonz/jj

geekster777• 2 years ago

Every cheat sheet like this highlights the surprisingly high learning curve of the git cli. It's an interface that really ships it's underlying data model rather than optimizing for common workflows. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, but I often feel like the target audience of git is the power user, leaving me uncertain anytime I need to perform an intermediate level action.

Lately I've been enjoying Graphite as a tool to interface with git. Commands are based around atomic actions I want to perform, despite often triggering multiple git commands under the hood. This has reduced my overall mental overhead, and removed many footguns.

adamsilkey• 2 years ago

Maybe my favorite option is missing here.

`git commit -v`

This will put the diff of the commit into your commit message as comments. Makes it easy to remember what you're doing/committing without having to jump back to the terminal/someplace else to look at the diff.

looshch2• 2 years ago

i have many aliases [1] for everything i ever need to do in git, serves me great for the past couple of years

[1] https://github.com/looshch/configs/blob/master/.gitconfig

Git cheat sheet [pdf]

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