TortoiseGit was very cool, and nothing stops us making more alternative UXes.
I miss the extensibility of Windows, back when programs still fought for the users (Tron reference). Shell extensions, COM/OLE, ActiveX controls. Sure they were annoying but they actually did stuff that we just can't do any more. Even start menu folders with more than one entry. It was like each thing you installed could be a plugin for your whole computer, not just an isolated space where you visit sometimes (the iOS model).
I puzzled over the "The Long and Short of It" as for me (git version 2.54.0)
git -h branch
gives the same output as
git branch --help
so I could not understand why master git jumped and died. But it seems that in older versions it threw an argument error according to the old discussion [0].
I see that `git -h branch`, `git branch --help` and `git --help branch` give the long output but `git branch -h` gives the short. I suspect that `git [-h | --help] branch` is converted to `git help branch` which runs `help` with argument `branch`. But `git branch -h` runs `branch` with argument `-h`. Also as `git -h alias` prints the alias definition while `git alias -h` gives the short help for the aliased command.
I use git every day and can do quite advanced stuff with it, but I do all of my work using magit in emacs. I don't even use emacs for writing code anymore, I only use it for git. I just can't be bothered with using the CLI, it is too painfully inconsistent.
The only downside to this is that it is hard for me to help people with git problems since I can only tell them what conceptually has to be done, not how to accomplish it using the CLI.
This is interesting to me because when beginners come to me for help with git and they're using a GUI, the first thing I do is tell them to ditch it and learn the CLI.
I don't fully agree with the checkout one. We do speak of checking out a file and checking out a branch using the same word, and they are not the same thing.
checkout -b however makes no sense. It should be the default behavior of git branch. It was probably put under checkout because it made for more straightforward code.
I don’t understand any of them. Normally even when I’m not really familiar with a tool, I have enough background knowledge to understand why it’s funny e.g. Scheme and Haskell jokes or something. I do use basic git regularly and all of this is over my head. I don’t know if that speaks to how complicated and unintuitive some of the advanced stuff is?
The context here is the statement that "its UX is famously... interesting". You don't have to understand anything other than how wildly inconsistent the git CLI is.
iirc Linus actually conceded this very early on and said that he thought it would be better if it were used as infrastructure to build tools on rather than the tool itself.
no idea where I saw that though and it was many many years ago.
There are, at this point, quite a few git-successors that either basically or literally use gits object model - git-butler, jujutsu, sapling (iirc). It's at worst good-enough.
In any case, the refined version of that admission - the deliberate porcelain/plumbing distinction - is still best explained in the git docs and I wish more tools would copy it.
apt(-get) has cautiously started that process, while GnuPG sadly remains a box shock full of surprises in both API and CLI.
The first release of git was in 2005, and Torvalds' Linux was clearly UNIX-inspired, so it's not like this was due to considerations for some other OS like DOS/Windows.
It sounds like they didn't need (at the time) to separate arguments from options, but they did need to separate revisions from pathspecs. So they repurposed "--" as the most familiar separator.
Probably they were trying to use familiar conventions, but when they later needed to separate arguments from options, that was a closer match for what other people were using "--" for, but it was too late.
So basically don’t break conventions by repurposing existing operators for something else.
It’s silly as git is otherwise a very elegantly designed application, and you’d expect it to be developed by people who are very accustomed to these conventions.
As a primarily FreeBSD user who feels like I have to relearn the idiosyncrasies of practically the entire system every I install a new Linux distro, the mess of configuration options somehow actually seems entirely on-brand to me.
It's only charged if you are a white upper middle class american. The rest of the world understands the difference between a term used in a software version control tool and slavery. The rest of the world also does not change a word on git while simultaneously fostering extremist far right views.
The whole thing makes absolutely no sense whatsoever.
It wasn't anyways. It was clearly in reference to "master copy", which is also not a charged term. Neither was "master bedroom". Hell, for most of my life I'd never even seen anyone raise objections over the master/slave dichotomy used in software and hardware either, which is a far easier to understand argument. It's all very recent, last decade and some change, despite many of these terms having come into use after the abolishment of slavery in the U.S.
The word "master" is of course still in widespread use elsewhere too. We still say "Master's degree" or "mastering a skill".
The point of this entire exercise was group dynamics, but what I hate most about it is something that I also hate about other recent bullshit: I hate that not wanting to play is in itself forced to be an active stance. I have no reason or desire to change my default branch name; it is staying master. That is not an attempt to signal anything at all. This is not "chud-coded". It is literally, the absence of a desire to participate.
And we'll never forget it either, because now even in pre-existing projects we have to checkout/pull master then main. Or worse. You know how many times I've accidentally rebased off of an ancient version of something because master still exists? This is surprisingly common.
It was an entire waste of time and everyone who has remaining respect for themselves should be honest about it.
> It is literally, the absence of a desire to participate.
I agree with this position, and yet I would argue that, by taking the time to write out this comment, you are acting inconsistenly with your own statement.
I have old repos with "master" and new repos with "main". If someone were to approach me about one of the old repos and ask about the default branch, I would immediately change it to "main" without any hesitation, because it is all but certain that trying to get into an argument will waste more of my time than just doing the change would.
My desire to not participate does not mean that I don't want to ever talk about it or that I am trying to minimize time wasted arguing about it. Hell, I'm happy to waste time arguing about anything, really. Especially if it's something that annoys me.
> I have no reason or desire to change my default branch name
And you're absolutely entitled to. I have no problem with anyone choosing to stick with "master", provided they have no issue with me preferring "main".
But I do have an issue with you preferring `main`. It means I have the constant annoyance of remembering whether a project uses `main` or `master`.
It's not a big annoyance but it is an especially painful one because it didn't used to exist and it was deliberately introduced for completely bullshit reasons.
This is actually one of the few places powershell begins to do something close to shine - the cli mixes data and commands in a way that we really shouldn't have to do.
The saddest thing is even ASCII has characters to help with this but since keyboards can't type them nobody used them.
As with almost any successful system: more and more special features and edge cases get added. Git has become ridiculously complex.
I wonder: would it not be better to tell users with those edge cases to fix their problems some other way? To take an example from the article: why does someone have a filename beginning with a dash? Maybe don't do that.
Sometimes you're using git in a context where you don't control the filenames, or where a potential attacker could influence or fully control them, at which point edge cases like this can easily turn into exploits.
I also chafe whenever I run into artificial restrictions on things like characters in names of things, because there's no good reason for them besides the laziness of developers or the limitations and inertia of existing systems that might be used under the hood, like DNS for instance.
> why does someone have a filename beginning with a dash? Maybe don't do tha
Oh, the famous "you're holding it wrong". For one, that's a ridiculous limitation to place on the user, that's a pretty basic symbol, but also imagine someone else did that and you can't change it because it's outside of your control
It's a problem with mixing code and data, therefore needing to escape. You can solve it by adding another symbol, let's call it Options Introducer, but that doesn't actually solve it because someone can name a file starting with Options Introducer. GUIs don't have this problem because you are clearly typing in the textbox or outside of it, or even better, you can select the file you mean.
It's from 2019, so it's hardly a recent development.
It's also very discoverable if you see it in the wild. You may be surprised that `--` doesn't work, but you won't be surprised `--end-of-options` represents the end of options.
What problem does this actually cause you? What additional complexity has adding this feature added to your development cycle?
How can text enable compabitility if you can't be certain how to parse it, and the rules can change any time???
Similarly with vendors - how can they lock you into themselves if you use some widespread open format?
That's not the benefit of text, just adoption. All these tools could've just as well grown to be popular with a proper format, and your point would be exactly the same
Master Git and a novice were walking to the market to collect alms.
The novice asked: "Master, what is the advantage of unstructured text over structured? Is it not mere adoption?"
Master Git said nothing and pointed to the first shop, kept by the old scrooge Postgre.
As they entered, Master Git said quietly, shaping his mouth funnily:
SELECT weight/2 FROM shelf WHERE name = ''
Postgre, long weary of Master's wisdoms, took a weight of three from the nameless shelf and cut it unevenly. The whole piece he pressed into the novice's bowl; the larger part, he kept for himself.
Next stood a shop kept by a bright newcomer, Duck D'Bee.
Master Git repeated:
SELECT weight/2 FROM shelf WHERE name = ''
Duck D'Bee smiled and handed over one piece and half of another.
Their journey ended at a giant abandoned building beneath a dead neon sign: ORCL. The door stood open. Inside, putrid odour and dust lay upon deflated balloons and faded banners saying A.I. The shelves were still full of unmarked boxes.
Master Git shouted into the dark:
SELECT weight/2 FROM shelf WHERE name = ''
Silence was the reply. At this point the novice became enlightened.
> All these tools could've just as well grown to be popular with a proper format, and your point would be exactly the same
And what would this "proper format" be? Currently JSON is in vogue (or JSON5, which allows comments?), but a few years ago it would have been XML, before that… CSV? TSV?
Yes, the lack of good design in that world is apparent and will continue to cripple a few more generations (but re. evolution that's often a false reading - in many cases it's some primitive napkin design made at the beginning of those decades that stuck without much evolution), but you've wandered into the wrong thread - it's not about the single best format that could've been, just about a circular logic flaw in the argument
You're damned right - much better is possible than the gnu tools. I'm one of the savages using pwsh on Linux (the other two are still on reddit). I have no need for sed/awk ascii salad, and jq can fuck off into the far distance.
If it's used for both, then you couldn't have "--" itself as a pathspec. In your first example, the current meaning is: a pathspec containing "rev", "--", and "pathspec".
Argh, that's when I wished for object oriented shells. Powershell sure isn't perfect but objects encoding their own meaning really helps differentiate those cases (but it may not always help the user if types aren't clear to the reader)
Hmm, not sure I understand. How are those shell based?
I agree that rust and haskell are not your typical OO (or not OO at all in a traditional sense) I guess my poorly worded claim was less focused on the OO nature of psh than on the typization (which both of these also do) - if you knew what type $rev and $path are, it's easier to distinguish intent, whether objects or not.
Of course, Rust and Haskell aren't typically thought of as shells. Though if you wanted to and felt brave enough, you could use ghci as a shell.
> I guess my poorly worded claim was less focused on the OO nature of psh than on the typization (which both of these also do) - if you knew what type $rev and $path are, it's easier to distinguish intent, whether objects or not.
It is an en dash, not an em dash, since it's about as wide as an n.
Some software substitutes a double hyphen -- with an en dash rather than em, and use the triple hyphen --- for the em dash. Perhaps Hacker News' title formatter is one of them.
Okay, edit submitted, but that is extra weird, because the double hyphen is a convention or placeholder for an emdash. When a transformation takes place, it becomes an emdash.
There is no reason to transform it to an endash. I don't know any software that would do that. Checked with an LLM, too. That makes no sense at all!
TeX uses -- (double hyphen) for producing an en dash and --- (triple hyphen) for an em dash, and that's pretty darn longstanding and well-established. And FWIW, the English writing conventions that I learned use em dashes as punctuation without an adjoining space—like this—but allow en dashes surrounded by spaces as an alternative – like this – so I frequently see spaced double hyphen used as the ASCII equivalent of dash punctuation and interpret it as the latter. I've never personally heard of double hyphen for em specifically, only either as en specifically or as a sort of ambiguous whatever-dash.
Unless, you know, you configured it to work differently. I'm using [Compose]nd and [Compose]md . And a bunch of other cute things, like [Compose][Compose] for escape (with Caps Lock as my compose key).
Then how do you type in an en dash instead? Also, according to LLMs, the en dash is used in far more languages than the em dash. Many languages don't use the em dash at all. Using the em dash for sentence interruptions seems to be specifically an US American English tradition: Most languages which use dashes for sentence interruptions use spaced en dashes instead.
I get en dash with alt+- and em dash with alt+shift+-. One of the niceties of the macOS keyboard layouts. There’s also the ellipsis and middot among other things.
From the title I've learned that git uses an em-dash instead of double dash as options delimiter. Thanks for pointing out that the title was wrong -- I've never had a need to use -- with git, so didn't know that it doesn't work.
Copilot CLI (we get that at work) often uses slightly low-level and cryptic git commands. Never noticed that it would use --end-of-options though.
Should check what it does with branch names starting with a dash.
Of course that wouldn't be a security vulnerability, but a user error. It asks user approvals to execute those things and has disclaimers to check results. Which of course every user does all the time... /s
Remembering app-specific one-offs is kind of the worst!
https://stevelosh.com/blog/2013/04/git-koans/
I miss the extensibility of Windows, back when programs still fought for the users (Tron reference). Shell extensions, COM/OLE, ActiveX controls. Sure they were annoying but they actually did stuff that we just can't do any more. Even start menu folders with more than one entry. It was like each thing you installed could be a plugin for your whole computer, not just an isolated space where you visit sometimes (the iOS model).
I see that `git -h branch`, `git branch --help` and `git --help branch` give the long output but `git branch -h` gives the short. I suspect that `git [-h | --help] branch` is converted to `git help branch` which runs `help` with argument `branch`. But `git branch -h` runs `branch` with argument `-h`. Also as `git -h alias` prints the alias definition while `git alias -h` gives the short help for the aliased command.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5512103
Especially because the text is actually written by a human, and it's clear from every sentence
The only downside to this is that it is hard for me to help people with git problems since I can only tell them what conceptually has to be done, not how to accomplish it using the CLI.
checkout -b however makes no sense. It should be the default behavior of git branch. It was probably put under checkout because it made for more straightforward code.
no idea where I saw that though and it was many many years ago.
There are, at this point, quite a few git-successors that either basically or literally use gits object model - git-butler, jujutsu, sapling (iirc). It's at worst good-enough.
The first release of git was in 2005, and Torvalds' Linux was clearly UNIX-inspired, so it's not like this was due to considerations for some other OS like DOS/Windows.
Probably they were trying to use familiar conventions, but when they later needed to separate arguments from options, that was a closer match for what other people were using "--" for, but it was too late.
It’s silly as git is otherwise a very elegantly designed application, and you’d expect it to be developed by people who are very accustomed to these conventions.
Now we can all run important CLI programs like Zork without a 'command doesn't exist' to command ratio of 1:4
The whole default branch name change was a terrible idea that caused many more problems than it solved—as was already pointed out at the time.
But if you're going to set a name anyway, may as well call it trunk, or dominatrix, depending upon today's silliness level.
The whole thing makes absolutely no sense whatsoever.
The word "master" is of course still in widespread use elsewhere too. We still say "Master's degree" or "mastering a skill".
The point of this entire exercise was group dynamics, but what I hate most about it is something that I also hate about other recent bullshit: I hate that not wanting to play is in itself forced to be an active stance. I have no reason or desire to change my default branch name; it is staying master. That is not an attempt to signal anything at all. This is not "chud-coded". It is literally, the absence of a desire to participate.
And we'll never forget it either, because now even in pre-existing projects we have to checkout/pull master then main. Or worse. You know how many times I've accidentally rebased off of an ancient version of something because master still exists? This is surprisingly common.
It was an entire waste of time and everyone who has remaining respect for themselves should be honest about it.
I agree with this position, and yet I would argue that, by taking the time to write out this comment, you are acting inconsistenly with your own statement.
I have old repos with "master" and new repos with "main". If someone were to approach me about one of the old repos and ask about the default branch, I would immediately change it to "main" without any hesitation, because it is all but certain that trying to get into an argument will waste more of my time than just doing the change would.
And you're absolutely entitled to. I have no problem with anyone choosing to stick with "master", provided they have no issue with me preferring "main".
It's not a big annoyance but it is an especially painful one because it didn't used to exist and it was deliberately introduced for completely bullshit reasons.
The saddest thing is even ASCII has characters to help with this but since keyboards can't type them nobody used them.
I wonder: would it not be better to tell users with those edge cases to fix their problems some other way? To take an example from the article: why does someone have a filename beginning with a dash? Maybe don't do that.
I also chafe whenever I run into artificial restrictions on things like characters in names of things, because there's no good reason for them besides the laziness of developers or the limitations and inertia of existing systems that might be used under the hood, like DNS for instance.
"User-controlled strings as parameters" is not "access to your git" but it is still an attack vector.
Oh, the famous "you're holding it wrong". For one, that's a ridiculous limitation to place on the user, that's a pretty basic symbol, but also imagine someone else did that and you can't change it because it's outside of your control
It's also very discoverable if you see it in the wild. You may be surprised that `--` doesn't work, but you won't be surprised `--end-of-options` represents the end of options.
What problem does this actually cause you? What additional complexity has adding this feature added to your development cycle?
Because it's my computer, not yours, and I'll do what I want with it?
Don't see that we get rid of either command lines in text or von Neumann any time soon.
The novice asked: "Master, what is the advantage of unstructured text over structured? Is it not mere adoption?"
Master Git said nothing and pointed to the first shop, kept by the old scrooge Postgre.
As they entered, Master Git said quietly, shaping his mouth funnily:
Postgre, long weary of Master's wisdoms, took a weight of three from the nameless shelf and cut it unevenly. The whole piece he pressed into the novice's bowl; the larger part, he kept for himself.Next stood a shop kept by a bright newcomer, Duck D'Bee.
Master Git repeated:
Duck D'Bee smiled and handed over one piece and half of another.Their journey ended at a giant abandoned building beneath a dead neon sign: ORCL. The door stood open. Inside, putrid odour and dust lay upon deflated balloons and faded banners saying A.I. The shelves were still full of unmarked boxes.
Master Git shouted into the dark:
Silence was the reply. At this point the novice became enlightened.And what would this "proper format" be? Currently JSON is in vogue (or JSON5, which allows comments?), but a few years ago it would have been XML, before that… CSV? TSV?
Or perhaps do a Choose Your Own Adventure:
* https://libxo.readthedocs.io/
The Unix-y world has been around for decades, so it many ways it has evolved rather than be designed.
Argh, that's when I wished for object oriented shells. Powershell sure isn't perfect but objects encoding their own meaning really helps differentiate those cases (but it may not always help the user if types aren't clear to the reader)
It's like passing a struct to a function instead of a badly serialized representation of a value
I agree that rust and haskell are not your typical OO (or not OO at all in a traditional sense) I guess my poorly worded claim was less focused on the OO nature of psh than on the typization (which both of these also do) - if you knew what type $rev and $path are, it's easier to distinguish intent, whether objects or not.
A shell is just a programming language that's well suited for interactive repl use. Compare https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scsh
Of course, Rust and Haskell aren't typically thought of as shells. Though if you wanted to and felt brave enough, you could use ghci as a shell.
> I guess my poorly worded claim was less focused on the OO nature of psh than on the typization (which both of these also do) - if you knew what type $rev and $path are, it's easier to distinguish intent, whether objects or not.
Agreed!
By the way, something munched the article title. An endash is incorrect command-line usage. It’s supposed to be a double hyphen.
Some software substitutes a double hyphen -- with an en dash rather than em, and use the triple hyphen --- for the em dash. Perhaps Hacker News' title formatter is one of them.
There is no reason to transform it to an endash. I don't know any software that would do that. Checked with an LLM, too. That makes no sense at all!
By pressing the "-" key for half a second and choosing the exact dash character I am looking for in the pop-up that shows near the caret.
KDE Plasma: Press-and-Hold for Alternative Characters https://blogs.kde.org/2026/03/14/this-week-in-plasma-press-a...
A /more recent/ convention.
My memory of early Associated Press computer systems is that two dashes is the endash (or "nutt") and three dashes is the emdash ("mutt").
Should check what it does with branch names starting with a dash.
Of course that wouldn't be a security vulnerability, but a user error. It asks user approvals to execute those things and has disclaimers to check results. Which of course every user does all the time... /s