Git

What hackers pick instead

• Jujutsu (jj)A Git-compatible version control tool that makes rebasing, stacked changes, conflicts and undo far easier; the common gripe is that bookmarks must be moved manually.335recommend
• MercurialRecommended as a friendlier, more predictable alternative to Git with clear commands and branch history kept in commits, though critics call it slow and short on Git-centric tooling.121recommend
• jj (Jujutsu)A Git-compatible version control tool that people find simpler than Git, with painless undo, easy history editing and light branching; skeptics say it isn't different enough to justify relearning.115recommend
• FossilRecommended for bundling wiki, tickets and forum with code in one self-hostable SQLite file, with a simpler interface than Git; critics note it forbids history rewriting and is opinionated.106recommend
• SubversionSimple, reliable centralized version control with linear revision numbers, praised for large binary files and long uptime. Critics mainly cite painful branching and merging.54recommend

Every quote

The 40 most detailed of 1806 comments. Each links to the original.

1. local branches are super useful, and it seems like all that focus on git being a distributed vcs allows (and requires) a dev to work more locally first

   Mixed · Jun 2026 · in “Epic Games announces Lore version control system”

2. Outside of large monorepo things, which are not the majority of modern commercial software projects, the main complaint I hear is the learning curve.

   Recommends · Jun 2026 · in “Git is forever. I'm building Oak anyways”

3. The whole point of git is to be decentralized so there is no reason for you to not have your current version available even when a remote is offline.

   Recommends · Mar 2026 · in “Moving from GitHub to Codeberg, for lazy people”

4. the surface of git (the CLI) is an abomination in many ways but the the mechanics of the tool are so ingrained and the model is so clear and simple

   Mixed · May 2026 · in “A History of IDEs at Google”

5. Git does great with text files, but game development contains a lot of binary assets (textures, videos, 3d models) and correspondingly huge repos.

   Mixed · Jun 2026 · in “Epic Games announces Lore version control system”

6. For everything I've ever done, git was practically instant (except network IO of course). It's one of the fastest and most reliable tools I know.

   Recommends · Apr 2026 · in “GitHub Stacked PRs”

7. Lightweight branch model of git mapped so much better to the way that actual development processes of medium to large projects really work(ed).

   Recommends · Apr 2026 · in “What is RISC-V and why it matters to Canonical”

8. From large files to sub modules to hook permissions and file permissions... The list goes on and on about what where git falls short.

   Mixed · Jun 2026 · in “Git is forever. I'm building Oak anyways”

9. You do know you can run git on your own machine, on pretty much any Linux/Unix based server, run it entirely peer-to-peer if you wish

   Recommends · Aug 2026 · in “Cursor launches Origin, GitHub alternative”

10. Having the repo local is amazing, being able to make a new branch in git even on a massive repo is lightening fast compared to svn.

    Recommends · Oct 2026 · in “We want you to build the next Git platform on Cloudflare”

11. Git sucks on so many points that there ain't be enough walls in the world to write our lamentations about it. But it's damn fast.

    Mixed · Jul 2026 · in “The Git history command deserves more attention”

12. Git has a very good conceptual model, and then provides operations (aptly named when you know about the model) to manipulate it.

    Recommends · Apr 2026 · in “GitHub CLI now collects pseudoanonymous telemetry”

13. It's pretty efficient because it's content-addressed, plus optimizations to reduce storage and data transfer with packfiles.

    Recommends · May 2026 · in “GitHub Is Down”

14. With “git reflog” and “git reset” or “git checkout” one can undo any series of ill conceived squash/rebase/amend operations.

    Recommends · May 2026 · in “Mercurial, 20 years and counting: how are we still alive and kicking? [video]”

15. Git may have an arcane interface, but if you learn it, you can be sure what exactly will happen when you run a Git command.

    Mixed · Mar 2026 · in “I'm OK being left behind, thanks”

16. Git is pretty simple internally, and its ui is just knobs and levers to reach into that simple reliable internal structure.

    Recommends · Apr 2026 · in “Ted Nyman – High Performance Git”

17. Git is a beautiful piece of software but it does expose complexity in a very by programmers for programmers kind of way.

    Mixed · Feb 2026 · in “Evolving Git for the Next Decade”

18. “decentralization” as in software that lets you do everything that is Not Internet Related locally is just a great thing

    Recommends · Nov 2025 · in “GitHub: Git operation failures”

19. a soft reset is basically the ideal way to just say “pretend all my changes weren’t committed yet, starting from $ref”

    Recommends · May 2026 · in “Defeating Git Rigour Fatigue with Jujutsu”

20. comfort with rebase, and confidence that I wont make an error I can't undo, comes from knowing that I can always abort

    Recommends · Jul 2026 · in “Git rebase -I is not that scary”

21. The whole reason for bringing a UI layer into all of this in the first place is freeing up my brain from having to deal with git's bullshit.

    Criticizes · Nov 2025 · in “The lazy Git UI you didn't know you need”

22. conflicts interrupt the merge/rebase. And if you end up in a situation with multiple rebases/merges/both, it's easy to get a "bad" state

    Criticizes · Mar 2026 · in “A Coherent Vision for the Future of Version Control”

23. Can you avoid a conflict if 2 people change the names of 2 different variables on one line as these are semantically unrelated changes?

    Criticizes · Dec 2025 · in ““You should never build a CMS””

24. sometimes just wonder how it became so big considering the simple or important things (like check-ins and merges) are so complicated

    Criticizes · Jun 2026 · in “Epic Games announces Lore version control system”

25. git-merge doesn't have a merge strategy of "null": don't try to resolve any merge conflicts, because I've already taken care of them

    Criticizes · Jan 2026 · in “I made my own Git”

26. it has a really opaque left/right or mine/theirs representation which even switches meaning depending on the operation you are doing

    Criticizes · Mar 2026 · in “A Coherent Vision for the Future of Version Control”

27. Git (and associated service providers) have a lot of work to do to scale out to large organizations working in a single code base.

    Criticizes · Mar 2026 · in “A Coherent Vision for the Future of Version Control”

28. Git has gotten pretty smart about that recently: once you resolve a conflict, if you get the same conflict again it automatically resolves it the same way.

    Recommends · Jan 2026 · in “Git Rebase for the Terrified”

29. learning vim keybindings+terminal git usage while they have the most plasticity is most likely going to be a good bet for the remainder of their career

    Recommends · Jul 2026 · in “The Lindy Effect in Software”

30. I generally like to use it. But I one project in the org which simply can’t work because the internal built system expects a normal .git directory

    Mixed · Nov 2025 · in “How I use every Claude Code feature”

31. it turns out it's weirdly handy in quite a few situations, god I wish it were implemented as a library and not a pile of Perl and shit

    Mixed · Mar 2026 · in “GitHub Is Having Issues”

32. Git using standard UNIX tools for these things instead of a specialized syntax, means I can easily write more complicated automations.

    Recommends · Sep 2026 · in “The creator of Jujutsu has joined ERSC”

33. those details generally suck more in git (or generally: distributed version control systems) than in traditional centralized VCS's

    Mixed · Jun 2026 · in “Epic Games announces Lore version control system”

34. It's perhaps not granular (the repository is the boundary, and that's that), but you can definitely restrict who can pull or push

    Mixed · Jun 2026 · in “Epic Games announces Lore version control system”

35. git is still freaking magic. We used to comment out the old version of code but leave it in the source as our sole undo strategy.

    Recommends · Aug 2026

36. I didn't have particularly challenging needs when it came to git so I wouldn't say that it's been a major headache overall for me

    Mixed · May 2026 · in “Mercurial, 20 years and counting: how are we still alive and kicking? [video]”

37. these are operations that would take a lawyer hours of cross-referencing, and they're free once the data is structured this way

    Recommends · Mar 2026 · in “I put all 8,642 Spanish laws in Git – every reform is a commit”

38. I use git checkout constantly, whenever I have a file in another branch or commit that I want to drag into this one wholesale.

    Recommends · Apr 2026 · in “What is jj and why should I care?”

39. This article doesn't do a very good job of convincing me that git is technically incapable of handling the described workload.

    Recommends · Oct 2026 · in “Redesigning source control at Anthropic”

40. Git works perfectly fine especially if you take an hour or two to learn how to do a few more complicated but useful workflows

    Recommends · Apr 2026 · in “We've raised $17M to build what comes after Git”