Explain Git with D3

4

kghose 3 years ago | link

This is quite spectacular, thanks! Extra bonus points for a working history in the command line and nice hints, like ‘enter a branch name …’
1
roryokane 3 years ago | link
The diagram doesn’t show one interesting thing about Git: HEAD usually refers to a branch, not to a commit. This is transparent in most cases, because Git usually just follows that branch’s pointer to get to the commit. But Git uses this when you create a new commit with git commit. It only updates the branch that HEAD points to to point to the new commit – it doesn’t update all branches that happened to be on the old commit.

The visualization could explain this aspect of Git’s model if the git checkout example displayed a normal HEAD and a detached HEAD like this:
```
  /''''\
--|    |
  \____/
 bb92e0e…
 [master] ← [HEAD]
 [tested]
```
```
  /''''\
--|    |
  \____/ ↖︎
 bb92e0e… [HEAD]
 [master]
 [tested]
```