Re: Command-line git Vs IDE+plugin?

From: Chris Packham <judge.packham@gmail.com>
Date: Dec 4, 2013, 11:10 UTC
Message-ID: <529F0DAF.7060800@gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <vpqiovpfxd1.fsf@anie.imag.fr>

On 19/11/13 06:11, Matthieu Moy wrote:

Show 6 quoted lines

> I was wondering whether others had similar (or not) experience. In
> particular, as a teacher, I'm wondering whether I should push my
> students towards the GUI in the IDE, or advise them to keep using the
> command-line (we teach them git with the command-line first anyway, but
> after a year of practice, we may want to show them the GUI equivalent).
>

My $0.02 as someone who performs some part-time SCM admin tasks for a moderately sized group of engineers (~40) with varying degrees of experience.

Some people are scared by a command line and think poking buttons in an IDE is preferable (and somehow safer). As others have pointed out the first sign of trouble they shuffle over to my desk. I see the people that are comfortable with the command line far less frequently.

I think learning the command line first does help with peoples overall understanding. Once they have some working knowledge of the basics introducing some of the tools that integrate with those building blocks is much easier.

In some respects the gui/IDE is better for some tasks. For example I don't even bother telling people about 'git add -p' because 'git gui' provides the same functionality with an interface that is better suited to picking chunks/lines of code to stage. Another example is Eclipse's "annotations" which provides the same information as 'git blame' but it is right there with the code I'm editing.

Specifically about Eclipse; I've personally found that in the days of Ganymede/Helios the VCS integration built around SVN and the mapping of SVN concepts to Git was imperfect (impossible?). With Juno/Indigo the support for DVCSes in general and for Git specifically is greatly improved but I still rarely use Eclipse to actually make commits.

- C