How often do you struggle with git?

https://xkcd.com/1597/

I’ve done that a couple of times in my life ☝️. I was young and inexperienced :)

Let’s be serious. I’ve found too often people having problems with git. You can just see this question in StackOverflow with more than 400,000 views and almost 3,000 upvotes!

I wanted to know more so I created a survey (you can still fill it if you want :), I put the link on Twitter and some Slack teams including Clevertech, the company I’m working for. 66 people filled the survey so far and these are some insights I’ve found (raw results here):

The not-so-interesting stuff

• Most people use the command line (75% as primary tool, 25% as secondary), but 66% use at least two tools. Sourcetree is used by many people as first (14%) or secondary tool (13%), and other people use their IDEs or text editors with integrated plugins for git. Surprisingly for me not many people use GitHub for Desktop or Tower.
• 72% use MacOS, 43% Linux or similar and 19% use Windows.
• People are happy with their tools: 55% like them and 17% LOVE them. But… are they really happy? Do these tools solve their problems? Let’s see the other answers…

The pain

• Most people have messed up with a repo a few times in their lives (62%) or sometimes (20%), or all the time! (3%). Only around 15% of the developers that filled the survey have never messed up a repo.
• 29% prefer to do only the basic things because they don’t feel confident or they need help with complicated stuff. That’s a lot of people, almost 1/3 of developers that filled the survey. The good part is that 70% feel confident using git or understand it completely. But is this a false sense of confidence?

False confidence?

• From the people that said they feel confident using git, 75.4% struggle with it at least once a month! So… is this a false sense of confidence?
• If we pick all the answers (including those who feel confident and those who don’t), only 7% never struggle with git, 13% struggle with it all the time, 14.5% struggle ~once a week and 37.7% ~once a month. So the overall is that 52.2% (most of the people) struggle with it at least once a month.

Conclusions

My conclusions are:

• There are too many developers struggling with git.
• There is a false sense of confidence.
• Git should be more usable, or we should build better tools on top of it. Tools suggesting what to do, how to do things, giving you choices and diagnosing problems.

Some ideas. Why don’t we have tools that ask us:

• app says: “You are in a detached head, you can fix it …”
• You want to merge two branches and the app suggests: “How do you want to merge the branch? a) Simple merge b) Squashing your commits into one c) Rebasing: putting your commits on top d) Squash and rebase. [x] Remember my decision” and show you in a graphical way how each option will leave the repository after executing it.