Most people don't use git particularly well. It's a capable piece of software that supports a number of different workflows, but because it doesn't mandate any particular workflow it's possible to use git productively for years without ever really touching some features.

And some of the features--in my experience mostly those related to more manual branching, merging, and history manipulation operations--are woefully underutilized. Part of this is because Github, which is responsible for facilitating much of git's use, promotes a specific workflow that makes it possible to do most of the (minimal required) branch operations on the server side, with the help of a much constrained interface. Github makes git usable by making it possible to get most of the benefit of git without needing to mess with SHA1 hashes, or anything difficult on the command-line.

That's a good thing. Mostly.

Nevertheless, there are a few operations that remain hard with git: I sometimes encounter situations that I have to try a few times before I get it right, and there are commands that I always have to check the man page to figure out how to specify the references. And even then I'm sometimes still confused. So maybe I (or we?) can spend a little bit of time and figure out what processes remain hard with git and maybe try and see if there is a way to make the process a bit more streamlined.

Here's my list:

  • Reorder all commits since x commit.

    This is basically: find the commit before the earliest one that you want to change, run git rebase -i <commit hash> to reorder the commits even though git sorts the commits in the order that I find most un-intuitive.

  • Create local branches to track remote branches or repositories.

    Setup the remotes, if necessary, and then run: git branch --track   <local-branch-name> <remote>/<branch-name> and git config   branch.{name}.push {local-branch}:master.

  • Stash all local changes and switch branches.

    It would also be nice if you could figure out way for git (or a helper) to see any open files in your text editor and save/close them if needed.

  • Pull a commit from the history of one branch into another branch without pulling anything else.

    I think this is chery-pick? It might also be nice to pull a series of commits from one branch, rebase them into one commit in the destination branch, and then commit that.

  • Pretty much every time I've tried to use the merge command to get something other than what I would have expected to happen by using "pull," it ends tragically.

Reader suggestions:

  • Put your process/procedural frustrations with git here.

How about we work on figuring out how to solve these problems in comments?