@DJMcMayhem Source control is witchcraft.

@NathanMerrill No this is a completely objective fact.

@flawr Do you not use it?

I think it's amazing

@DJMcMayhem Whenever I try to learn e.g. git I quickly get to a point that I cannot find answers for.

(And so far I never had to work together with other people on larger projects.)

Thankfully, I'm quite a bit better with Git than that. :P

@flawr I could not more highly recommend you learn how to use source control. I use git for personal projects and Mercurial at work, and honestly hg isn't too bad even though it's not as popular. If it helps, you could use a GUI version rather than CLI

@El'endiaStarman Unfortunately it seems that most people who write about git are about at this level.

maybe I'm in too deep, but I'm confused by what is hard about git

Actually, thinking back, I can remember myself being confused. I don't remember what about

so yeah, I am in too deep :)

There are a lot of things that are confusing. While you're using it correctly, 90% of the time everything works fine. But when something goes wrong, it's really hard to figure out why and how to fix it

yeah. Many of the multi-step processes are really confusing

like, the fact that you can't do a bunch of stuff while merging is really annoying.

or apply patches

Undoing is generally tough too

like "How do I undo a commit" is a really complicated answer

Well when I first tried to use it there was just this language barrier as I just couldn't imagine what a "repository" is or what "rebase" or "checkout" or "upstream" meant.

And I still think they just aren't the most intuitive names.

Rebase is the worst of those

At some point I found this and this, which helped a little bit to get the big picture.

But maybe I can ask you a few questions I you do not mind:)

those pictures are terrible, but ask away :)

like, they aren't how I visualize it at all :)

@flawr Not at all! Feel free, but keep in mind I'm Rusty and not the most knowledgeable

@DJMcMayhem so you're an expert from my perspective

Is it correct that whenever I move or rename a file (that I want in my version control) I need to use the git command?

no

You can do whatever you want with your files

(And cannot just [crtl+c]/[crtl+v] or [f2]?)

you will need to eventually need git to "catch up" to your changes

so you do git add -A

and it'll figure out what files you've moved around, or changed

What does -A do?

All

I generally use git add .

How is this different from git add *?

the period meaning the current directory

that is equivalent to the * as well

well, maybe?

let me test

@NathanMerrill Oh, TIL. I would always do git add [files]

ok, so yeah, * are . are equivalent

they add files in the current directory (and subdirectories)

they don't add every file though

because if you are in a subdirectory, it'll only add the ones in the subdirectory, not the changes in the root

but git add -A will

and to "add" is the same as to "stage"?

yes

Staging is mostly useful for deciding what you want in your commit. I wouldn't use it for anything else

ok and whenever you commit all added files will be taken a snapshot of in your current "repository" (appended to the current branch)

Yep

honestly, I wouldn't worry about branch trees. They are really only useful when comparing commits, which should be rather rare

Snapshot is the useful abstraction IMO

So how do you get your files from your local repository to e.g. github?

Yep, source control is a series of snapshots.

git push

@flawr push

You need to do some setup first (git remote origin master? or something) to set up where you're pushing to

When you push it the first time, it'll say "I won't know what branch to push too". This is git being complicated, but it'll give you a helpful command to type

just copy/paste that command, and use it

oh, DJ is right here

you first have to setup the URL to push to

I'm right? Cool! :P

So what exactly happens when you push your stuff to github, will every little change you recorded be public?

yep

every commit you made is public

not necessarily change

because you can change a file multiple times, but only the state of the file at the point of commit is saved

Anyways, for github, you generally need to setup the repository. You go onto their website, and create a repository. They'll give you some nice commands to add the repository URL, and then push it

@NathanMerrill Yeah I think they pretty much guide you step by step.

yeah, they do. Some of the steps are unnecessary if you've already made a local repository, though

What do you do if you want to move some project to a different place? (e.g. from D:/foo/MyProject to D:/bar/MyProject)

copy the folder

all of the git files are in a subdirectory, so it just works

ooh

so the misterious "repository" where you record your changes is some invisible file in your project folder?

yep. In a folder named .git

Hm that all makes a lot more sense now:)

Other practical advice: I recommend adding a .gitignore to your root directory.

It lists files and folders you don't ever want to commit

So for each project you will usually have a seperate "repository"?

yep

every KotH I do has a different repo

@NathanMerrill do you edit that manually or do you also use some git command?

there might be a command, but I do it manually

@flawr Edit manually

it's literally just a list of filenames and folders, newline separated

And when you use a different computer and you want to work on one of your projects, what do you do?

That's when you pull or clone

clone the first time, pull the rest of the times

clone is basically "Start a git repo, use this URL, and pull"

Ah I see.

I think this is the last question I have now: What do you do if you want to remove all git files (i.e. all meta/tracking data) from some project?

remove the .git folder

So this is just one folder in the root directory of your project?

Well thanks a lot @NathanMerrill and @DJMcMayhem, this cleared a lot of things up for me that no tutorial managed to get across.

@flawr Yep

Glad to help!

@flawr yep. It's possible for it to exist in other spots within your project, but if you ever come across that, you're in a mess :)

I'm trying out Spotify, so I'm in the process of transferring playlists. Unfortunately, I'm finding that around 13% of the music I had on Youtube simply doesn't exist on Spotify.

I honestly have no idea what I'll end up choosing

Speaking of spotify, I had something funny happen to me last week. They rolled out their 2018 in review just like they do every year. My #1 artist was somehow Christopher Larkin (Hollow Knigh composer). I was kinda surprised

I hate choosing between better music experience vs more music

And all top 5 of my songs were from Hollow Knight

hehe

Apparently I spent 20 hours of listening to Hollow Knight (not factoring in the 70+ hours I was listening to the actual music inside the game itself)

What songs? Like, I think the music in Hollow Knight is great, but it's great in the context of HK. I'd never listen to it outside of the game

@NathanMerrill I didn't really listen to any of the songs individually, I just listened through the whole soundtrack several times.

Which was apparently enough to make my top songs

@NathanMerrill this isn't true. I could definitely listen to NKG boss fight