git-exercises VS git-cola

This is blog I wrote after attempting to complete Git exercise by fracz. So, speaking about git exercise it's a set of tasks that will give you a basic understanding of how Git works and various commands that you can try out. You can try out by going to Git Exercise, go here and follow the steps mentioned. So going further I am hoping you all know about what Git is and why it has great importance in this industry. Buckle up let's go for the adventure of understanding git.

Looks great!

I'm really missing support for remotes. There are lots of tools for local-only development (like https://gitexercises.fracz.com/), but very few allow to demonstrate stuff like "Syncing a GitHub fork with the original repository" which involves two remotes and three copies of the same branch at the very least.

It's worth it. You'll have to figure it out eventually. You might as well learn early to 1) save yourself time, and 2) make yourself look competent at your software engineering job. fracz's git-exercises are what helped it click for me.

> Visual Studio does a decent job of abstracting the GIT nuances, but I personally use GIT Extensions, which looks and feels much better on Windows than the other cross platform UIs.

IDEs and text editors sometimes have nice Git integrations in the UI, but I wanted standalone software that I can use for anything from various programming projects, to something like gamedev projects (with Git LFS) or arbitrary documents.

In the end, I just forked over some money for GitKraken, it's pretty good, especially with multiple accounts on the same platforms, when you want to switch between them easily: https://www.gitkraken.com/

There's also Sourcetree which I used before then, kind of sluggish but feature complete: https://www.sourcetreeapp.com/

For something more lightweight, I also enjoyed Git Cola on various OSes: https://git-cola.github.io/ Even Git documentation has a page on the software out there, a good deal of which is free and has good platform support: https://git-scm.com/downloads/guis

Quite frankly, I spend like 90% of the time using a GUI interface nowadays, when I want to easily merge things, or include very specific code blocks across multiple files in a commit, or handle most of the other common operations. Of course, sometimes there's a need to drop down to the CLI, but you're right that some GUI software feels like it actually improves the usability here.

I think Git can be a pretty pleasant experience for most folks, as long as you use the basic features and maybe even consider a GUI, anything from Git Cola (free: https://git-cola.github.io/), to something like GitKraken (paid for all features: https://www.gitkraken.com/).

Curiously, the latter also let me setup different accounts that I can switch between with a simple dropdown, which was otherwise annoying when you have Gitea, GitHub, GitLab and others to manage, way easier than https://docs.github.com/en/account-and-profile/setting-up-an...

Either way, suddenly you see the graph of your repo and most of the common actions are a click away, you can just let your brain idle and think about other things you're doing instead, in addition to that working really well with staging chunks of your code, or individual files, cherrypicking and so on.

Then again, personally I prefer squashing in merge/pull requests instead of rebasing, or even just doing regular merge commits and leaving the history as is (which doesn't really scale, but I haven't gotten to the point where that matters that much), so how I use Git won't work for everyone.

> We now have a large selection of tools that allow you to visualize what's going on (I use git-kraken), as well as google for help on doing something that isn't in muscle memory.

Git Kraken is excellent, though Git has a page on various GUIs, many of which are free with no restrictions: https://git-scm.com/downloads/guis

Personally, on Windows I like SourceTree: https://www.sourcetreeapp.com/

Some that have worked with SVN back in the day like TortoiseGit: https://tortoisegit.org/

On *nix Git Cola seems to do the job for me: https://git-cola.github.io/

Then again, the most complex workflow I've worked with was Git Flow and I didn't need anything more advanced than that. Come to think of it, I don't really do rebases often either and mostly just take advantage of squashing commits through GitLab/Gitea and such, when needed.

But hey, that's also valid, using Git in a way where you get version control but mostly keep the technical details out of your way (though Git LFS and certain cases with particular line endings being needed does make you drop down occasionally).

Try git cola. It's not the slickest but it scratches my pointy/clicky desires for git pretty well.

If you can tolerate a GUI, Git Cola might be a solution. I'm using it exclusively for some 5 years now – it's lightweight enough, but still makes you think about what you're about to commit. You can add things to .gitignore directly from there, too.

https://git-cola.github.io/

Default layout is pretty barebones, here's what I'm doing instead: https://u.ale.sh/my-git-cola-screenshot.png

i still don't know how to split one commit into multiples (without going insane (if it's even possible)) without a gui like https://github.com/git-cola/git-cola, and that should be a simple operation (especially with git's "split every change into individual commits make it easier to cherry pick" conventions)