Git cheat sheets are a dime-a-dozen but I think this one is awfully concise for its scope.

  • Visually covers branching (WITH the commands – rebasing the current branch can be confusing for the unfamiliar)
  • Covers reflog
  • Literally almost identical to how I use git (most sheets are either Too Much or Too Little)
  • nous@programming.devEnglish
    71·
    2 months ago

    GUIs tend to only cover the common/basic usage. Which is easy to remember without a cheat sheet. When you need more advanced stuff then GUIs tend to become more of a sticking point I find. And with common workflows it is far easier to automate with the CLI then with a GUI.

    • Cyno@programming.dev
      7·
      2 months ago

      When you need more advanced stuff then GUIs tend to become more of a sticking point I find

      What’s stopping you just opening the terminal in those rare cases? For 99% of my daily needs I’m good with a good GUI

      • nous@programming.devEnglish
        1·
        2 months ago

        Typically because you have been leaning on the GUI for ages and don’t know the CLI well enough to do the easy stuff quickly let alone the advanced stuff at all. Or are even aware of what you can do with the CLI. And if you do know the CLI well enough you tend to find it just faster to work with and easier to automate things.

        • Cyno@programming.dev
          2·
          2 months ago

          How will manually retyping git pull or checkout 30+ times a day, or using the terminal log instead of a nice GUI with VSCode integration, teach me to solve other complicated issues? I just don’t really see the benefit of struggling for most of the time for something that might or might not happen later

          • nous@programming.devEnglish
            1·
            2 months ago

            You should not be struggling most of the time when using the CLI. Basic uses is just as easy as any GUI. Learning the commands might be a bit more involved and you need to be a bit more proactive about it. Anything you need to do 30+ times a day you should be over the learning curve of and can just execute them just as quickly if not quicker than using GUI. Especially when you look at tab competition and the reverse history search.

            But what using the CLI more often does teach you is how to lessen that initial learning curve. Making you quicker at finding the new commands you need and how they work slowly building up your tool belt of knowledge about the commands you do look up.

    • drathvedro@lemm.ee
      4·
      2 months ago

      Any half-decent GUI should cover everything shown in this cheatsheet. You’d have to do quite some voodoo witchcraft to need CLI these days. It’s actually the reverse sometimes, when my terminal bretheren complain that I do too much witchcraft when I’m just tidying stuff up with a GUI.

    • EatATaco@lemm.eeEnglish
      4·
      2 months ago

      Other than untracking tracked files, I see nothing in this graphic that isn’t easy to do with a gui. That might even be easy to do but it is something I do in the cli. Can I get some examples?

      I would also argue that the common/basic stuff is 99% of what I do with git. And for this I can’t fathom why people would think the cli is better. Like logging and diffing is just so much easier when I can just scroll and click as opposed to having to do a log command, scroll, then remember the hashes, and then write the command. This is something instantly available to me in a gui.

      Don’t get me wrong, if the cli is better for you more power to you. We moved from p4 to git and I did this almost exclusively in the cli so I could use scripts more easily. And sometimes I watch beginners use the gui and I have to bite my tongue because I know it would be faster in the cli.

      But, especially for a beginner, i strongly recommend a gui.

      • fool@programming.devOP
        4·
        2 months ago

        Click to view diffs is super ergonomic; on the other hand, I actually have a story about the Git CLI trumping the GUI (spoiler: reflog).

        In high school we had gotten the funding to build a robot, and one of the adults in charge – guy was brilliant – was using GitHub Desktop to conduct a feature merge with the student who served as team lead. The thing was, he was used to older codebases, so all of his experience was with CVS instead of Git – so when the two slightly messed up the git merge, they discussed recloning everything instead of wasting time plumbing the error (relevant xkcd).

        That was one of the earliest times I had the cajones to walk up to a superior and say “No, you’re doing this totally wrong. You don’t have to do that.”

        He looked at me and nodded. “What would you do instead?”

        “Reflog.”

        “Reflog? I’ve never heard of it before. Can you show us?”

        I hopped onto the laptop and clicked around GitHub Desktop, but couldn’t manage to find any buttons related to reflog… so I went straight to cmd.exe instead.

        git reflog
git reset --hard "HEAD@{7}"

        “Done. We can continue rebasing.”

        And after that, the advisor complimented me for using the command line tool!

        “Lots of GUI apps are just limited frontends to the real meat and potatoes, the command line. Nice job!”

        I felt like a wizard! And so I became the team’s Git-inator.

        edit: pruned story

      • expr@programming.dev
        4·
        2 months ago

        Interactive rebase? There’s no GUI that actually does that well, if at all. And it’s a massive part of my daily workflow.

        The CLI is far, far more powerful and has many features that GUIs do not.

        It’s also scriptable. For example, I often like to see just the commits I’ve made that diverge from master, along with the files changed in each. This can be accomplished with git log --oneline --stat --name-status origin/master..HEAD. What’s more, since this is just a CLI command, I can very easily make a keybind in vim to execute the command and stick it’s output into a split window. This lets me use git as a navigation tool as I can then very quickly jump to files that I’ve changed in some recent commit.

        This is all using a standard, uniform interface without mucking around with IDE plugin settings (if they even can do such a thing). I have many, many other examples of scripting with it, such as loading side-by-side diffs for all files in the worktree against some particular commit (defaulting to master) in vim in a tabpage-per-file, which I often use to review all of my changes before making a commit.

        • robinm@programming.dev
          1·
          2 months ago

          There are cases where instead of origin/master..HEAD you may want to use @{upstream}..HEAD instead to compare with the upstream of your current branch. It’s unfortunately quite unknown.

      • nous@programming.devEnglish
        3·
        2 months ago

        I see nothing in this graphic that isn’t easy to do with a gui.

        I didnt say the GUI was not easy for the common stuff. But I think the CLI is also easy for the common stuff so there is not much advantage other than a bit of a learning curve with the CLI. But the big thing that GUIs make harder is automation of common things. For instance, when I want to create a PR I like to rebase to the latest upstream. In a GUI that is a bunch of button clicks. With the cli I just <CTRL+R>pus and that will autocomplete to git pull --rebase=interactive --autostash && git push && gh pr create --web and I am landed in a web browser ready to review and submit my PR. Doing the same thing in a GUI takes a lot longer with a lot more clicking.

        And that is a very common command for me.

        Like logging and diffing is just so much easier when I can just scroll and click as opposed to having to do a log command, scroll, then remember the hashes, and then write the command.

        Never found that to be a big issue. Most of the time when you want a diff you want to diff local changes or staged changes which is simply git diff and git diff --staged neither of those are hard or any real easier in the GUI (especially with bash history). For diffing specific commits I dont find that hard either just git log --oneline and find the commits (and you can use grep to filter things out easily as well here) - typically does not require scrolling at all. Then git diff <copy paste>..<copy paste>. In the GUIs you are often scrolling through commits you want to select at some point so I dont see how that saves you any real time here. I would not say the CLI or GUI is vastly easier in this case. And even in this case it is rare to need to do. Far more often is just branches which on a decent shell can be tab completed for convenience.

        And sometimes I watch beginners use the gui and I have to bite my tongue because I know it would be faster in the cli.

        This is why I prefer the CLI for common stuff. It is just faster.

        But, especially for a beginner, i strongly recommend a gui.

        And that is where I disagree. I think beginners should spend some time learning the tools they will need to use. IMO the CLI is critical for developers to learn and the sooner the better. So many things a vastly easier with the CLI than GUIs and a lot of stuff is near impossible with GUIs. Automation being a big one. I have not seen a good CI system that is GUI focused that you never need to know the cli for. Or when you have a repetitive task then it is quicker to write a quick script and run that then doing the same thing over and over in the GUI. Repeating actions is also easier in the CLI. All of these apply to more than just git as well.

        I have seen so many beginners start with GUIs that don’t really understand what they are doing in git. And quite often break things and then just delete and recreate the repo and manually make their changes again. I find people that never bother with the CLI always hit a ceiling quite quickly in terms of their ability and productivity.

        The only real thing that makes the CLI worst is that it has a steeper learning curve. Once you are over that hill I find it to be vastly better for more situations or at least not practically any worst than a GUI equivalent. So that hill is one well worth climbing.

        I can always use a GUI if I really needed to. But those that only know the GUI will have a very hard time on the CLI when they need to - which is required far more often than the other way round.