Re: Command-line interface thoughts

[Michael Haggerty <mhagger@alum.mit.edu>]

On 06/10/2011 11:48 PM, Junio C Hamano wrote:
> In short, the proposed "NEXT" does not help in a situation with conflicts,
> and makes the user experience worse.

The idea of "NEXT" and its friends would indeed be marginal if it only
applied to "git diff".  The real gain in learnability comes from using
the same idioms in other commands where they make sense; for example,

    # More consistent alternative to the special "--ours" option:
    git checkout OURS -- Makefile

    # This would add more completeness to the
    # "git checkout <tree-ish> -- PATH" command, and would remain the
    # default if no <tree-ish> is specified:
    git checkout NEXT -- Makefile

    # I had to look up the current way to spell this
    # ("git show :Makefile"), but this variant would be obvious
    # by analogy with the other uses of NEXT:
    git show NEXT:Makefile

and of course also in the proposed "git put" command.

Michael

-- 
Michael Haggerty
mhagger@alum.mit.edu
http://softwareswirl.blogspot.com/