How to use Git easily without memorizing 40 commands

You don't need to know all of git. You need about eight commands and a habit of committing often.

Git scares new developers way more than it should. Part of the reason is every tutorial tries to teach you rebasing and cherry-picking in week one, when honestly 90% of your daily work only needs a handful of commands used the same way every time.

The commands you actually use daily

git status              # what's changed
git add .                # stage everything
git commit -m "message"  # save a checkpoint
git pull                 # get latest from remote
git push                 # send your commits up
git checkout -b branch   # new branch
git log --oneline        # see recent history

That's genuinely most of it. Rebasing, cherry-pick, reflog — you'll learn those when you actually need them, and you'll need them a lot less often than tutorials make it seem.

The habit that matters more than any command

Commit small, commit often, and write a message that says why, not what (the diff already shows what). "Fixed bug" is a useless commit message. "ABC-204: null check was missing on refund amount" tells a story someone can actually use later.

Where a tool like Jitly fits in

Jitly doesn't replace git, it just wraps the repetitive part of it. When you run jitly start ABC-123, under the hood it's running the same git checkout main, git pull, and git checkout -b you'd type yourself, just with the branch name generated from your ticket instead of you typing it. jitly done does the git add, git commit, git push sequence, with the commit message filled in from your ticket template. It's still git, just fewer keystrokes and less chance of a typo in the branch name.

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