The light finally came on for me when I bit the bullet and dug into git's internals. It's a beautifully simple model. Git's internals are much easier to learn than its dumpster fire UI, and once you understand the internals, the UI can be understood as something that started out reflecting the internals but then had a boatload of edge case convenience features glued on without an overall design plan.
This! I did the same thing: read about the model for the commits, the blobs and the hashes. When you know that (just the basic data model, which is really simple), it's a lot easier to understand and memorise the different git commands.
In fact I often work with git using the tools that come with it: git on the commandline, gitk for the visualization of the history and 'git gui' for committing work. They might look outdated, but they work really well and are really fast.
There are a lot of modern graphical tools to work with git repos, but some of them introduce their own vocabulary in an attempt to make using git 'simpler', but this just ends up making everything more confusing.
My impression is that a lot of people want powerful tools, but do not want to invest the time to learn how to handle them. The Pro Git book is available to read for free online and after reading the first 3 chapters, you should know about the most important things for day-to-day use. Some people would do anything to avoid reading the documentation: they'd rather spend a whole day checking different guis that make things look easy and familiar instead of spending that time reading the documentation.
Can you enlighten me how git's internal model is more beautiful than, say, Mercurial? Which has the added bonus of having a UI which isn't a dumpster fire...
I haven't studied Hg's internals. I much prefer Hg to git (because its UI makes sense) but I no longer have the happy option of using it. So rather than continue to fight a battle that was already lost, I decided to embrace git.
For what it's worth, I've been using Mercurial + hg-git to interact with git repos since 2010 and I still do with all my git and github using colleagues.
