About Git for non-users

It may not be immediately obvious that Git isn’t just a tool for developers to manage and share code. On this page, we hope to describe the usefulness of Git to someone who has never used it.

“Save early, save often” with time travel

We all learned at some point to “save early, save often”. Maybe we learned the hard way by starting with a very naive approach to writing a document:

Saving when you’re done editing a file

If your computer crashes before you’re done, you could lose all your work!

Saving frequently

If your computer crashes, you’ll be able to recover where you last saved. But what if you save and then later realize that part of your document had been deleted before saving?

Saving copies frequently

This enables you to view old versions of your document, as long as you manually saved a copy with a unique name. But what if you start having trouble figuring out whether the version you want is document_new_final_really_final.csv or document_final_v2_latest.csv?

Saving copies with a naming convention

This enables you to find the right version at a glance. Maybe you use dates or a version number that always goes up. This requires you to put in a nontrivial amount of effort managing your versions.

Using a version management program

Instead of manually naming your files, a program could do it for you. You don’t even need to look at all those copies because that program could store them somewhere out of sight, and put only the version you want in document.csv. This program could also talk to other version management programs to share all the different versions with someone else, and also get their versions and help merge your work with theirs. This is what Git does.