What have I missed?

[Era Scarecrow via Digitalmars-d]

On Saturday, 9 August 2014 at 07:12:45 UTC, eles wrote:
> I am not a heavy github user and I use git basically only for 
> myself and collaboration outside my workplace (there, we use 
> the "professional" ClearCase...), but for git, I could 
> recommend you these resources:

  I'm watching a few tutorials on GitHub and i have a book on Git. 
Still doesn't explain about the problems i had. I'm sure Git will 
sink into my brain very soon at the rate i'm consuming the 
material.

  Clearcase... i remember that... used it once...

> One word of caution about git: once you learn it, you'll pretty 
> much dump anything else and you'll become addicted to it to the 
> point that you'd dream to git-ify all your projects and stuff.

  Yeah thought about that myself. Most of my personal project are 
'duplicate the entire directory and rename the new one to reflect 
the version' and use diff and patch... it works... although it's 
not pretty and uses a lot of space... thankfully 7zip does a good 
job compacting all of them together.

> All these were missing one crucial feature at that time and, 
> one day, I stumbled upon git (I was avoiding git on purpose, 
> just to not join the acclaiming chorus) and had the "a-ha" 
> moment. I have found it. The feature was:
>
> "so I can change the version of the code that I work on without 
> having to change my folder, paths, put in plae symbolic links 
> for my IDE and stuff? It takes just a 'git checkout 
> the_other_branch' and it is exactly at the point where I did 
> left it? and I am able to switch branches for just 2 minutes, 
> every 3 minutes, just to compare results and so on? WOW!"
>
> I forgot how the world was looking before the advent of git. I 
> forgot on purpose.

  Things will be easier when it clicks for me i'm sure. Re-reading 
part of the book, a portion of it, the designs behind Git makes 
sense, but there's no 'ah ha!' moment, not yet. I think mostly 
it's the terminology i'm confused on since i'm often a blank 
state (self taught).

  I'm seriously tempted to set up a VM or separate machine with a 
linux distro and programming environment. My main computer 
doesn't feel like a programming station anymore.