Prose Fusion, 2023-10-18

Terminals and Command History

• observation: each terminal window has its own history, which is saved to the saved-history file when you exit that terminal instance
• observation: in Windows, I'm not sure the shell history always works correctly
• idea: there could be a way to merge all the histories together in real time
  • we asked ChatGPT about this, and it gave us a clunky way to keep a merged history in bash (link into Pete's ChatGPT history, link will break some day)
• observation / idea: keep a notepad/textedit/obsidian page with your commonly-used commands, and copy/paste to/from your terminal
  • use history > tmp.txt to save history (in zsh, history 1 > tmp.txt)
• observation / idea:

A Hypothesis About Learning Git

Old: Git is complicated.

New:

• Git has a small number of key moving pieces.
• There is a non-trivial (but not necessarily complicated) way the pieces interact and need to be used.
• However, using it could be understandable by a 7-year-old, it's not rocket science.
• The Git "user interface" (commands, etc.) is a mess for historical reasons, which means advanced use is done in "wizard mode" by consulting a book of spells (formerly Stack Overflow, now more by asking ChatGPT).
• But normal day-to-day use doesn't have to be in wizard/spellbook mode.
• There are not (yet) many really good, accessible explanations; Git has historically been learned by apprenticing rather than by reading good explanations.
• Together, we can make good explanations.

Git File Management

Referring to the diagrams in Oliver Steele's 'My Git Workflow' and [[Git Workflow Diagram]].

• workspace = my files I'm working on and making changes to
• commit - a related set of changed files; done as one more-or-less atomic task
• index or staging = an area where I'm assembling a commit (under the hood, this is just a list of files, not actual copies of files)
• local repository = where sequential commits are held (under the hood, this is copies of versions of files, in sort of a filesystem database)
• remote repository = either a centralized or peer repository I sync to and from

Other terminology and notes:

• upstream
• downstream
• branch
  • main (fka master)

Git conflict resolution works per "line" of text.

• A line of text is all the text before a linebreak. (Might be displayed on more than one line on the screen, if the line is long and it wraps.) Sometimes also thought of as a "paragraph" in text editors and word processors.