There's no shortage of ideas when it comes to making one's life easier when tackling Git. That says a lot about both the power and the learning curve of the tool. Here's a new educational tool that demystifies Git commands and their syntax.

Last month I discovered "Oh My Git! The Game". a multi-platform interactive game which takes you from being a complete newbie to efficient expert by covering everything you are likely to need. Now I've stumbled across another cool resource, Git Command Explorer, devised by Shashank Singhal, which makes the following bold claim:

Find the right commands you need without digging through the web.

Let's see if that statement attests to the truth.

First of all the interface is uncomplicated.You just pick a command from the top-level drop-down box then pick the action you want to perform from the second-level drop-down and magically the one liner that you should type on the CLI to perform that action is revealed.

For example in picking command "clone" and then action "existing repo into a new directory", you get

git clone <repo-url> <directory>

with the note that clarifies further that:

the repo is cloned into the specified directory.
Replace "directory" with the directory you want

For the complete picture, the rest of the actions on "clone" are

• existing repo into the current directory
• existing repo along with submodules into the current directory
• submodules after cloning existing repo

Of course the one-liner changes depending on the action picked.

Some commands have got third-level actions too, for instance "stash" is broken down as

1st level - "stash"
2nd level - "delete"
3rd level all - "stashed changes"

What I particularly like is that this can be read in reverse as well. For example, if I have no idea what "git stash" is capable of, I can find out by observing the values in the drop-down boxes!

The full list of the top level values is :

• add
• commit
• revert
• initialize
• modify
• show
• delete
• compareCommits
• configure
• clone
• ignore
• rename
• merge
• squash
• stash
• debug
• recover
• synchronize
• rebase
• cherrypick

So whether you know the commands but can't remember the syntax or you don't know the commands and want to find out more about them, Gitexplorer is the tool for you.

More Information

Git Command Explorer

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Oh My Git! The Game

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