Why do so many people resist Git GUIs?
Published by marco on
The post Why Git is so hard to learn and how best to teach it. (Reddit) included the following phrase,
“Any student given the choice will use a GUI version like desktop.”
What’s wrong with that? Are there use cases that students can’t cover using a UI? Is there some reason they need to use the command line?
My students generally end up using VSC Git UI (or VS Git UI) but I start off by recommending SmartGit because it’s much better at visualizing and handling the kinds of problems that students tend to produce.
Merge conflicts have a lot of inherent complexity that there is no way around teaching. Once you’ve internalized that complexity, and understand how to deal with it, you wonder what the big deal ever was, but I’ve met many developers and students who need a lot of time to grok it. And many never do. They just do what that XKCD says: nuke it from orbit and start again.
But a good UI (like SmartGit) offers insight into the code base—at a glance—that, even if it doesn’t help the student, helps me to help them solve their problem relatively quickly.