Comment by globular-toast

I'm the "git guy" at every place I work and I don't touch the git CLI. Been using Magit for 15 years now. I just don't think a CLI is a good interface for state mutation.

CLIs are perfect for functional interfaces, like grep, sed etc. But I think they are very hard to get right when side effects are in play. Really basic things like mkdir and rm are ok, but when you have enormously powerful things like git rebase I find it difficult to keep track of what's going on.

I wonder what a more functional Unix would look like... Instead of mkdir just write to any path, instead of rm just overwrite a path with nothing, maybe we'd accept that mv would be implemented as "porcelain". The balance I think is keeping a lid on how complex that porcelain can become, and git has way overstepped the mark. So I prefer GUI/TUI interfaces for mutation, and Emacs is the best there is for building those.