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So You Think You Know Git - FOSDEM 2024

GitButler
Talks
YouTube
1 HN user recommended this talk1 month2024–2025 score 1
Years with an HN recommendation, 2007–2026

HN commenters point to it as a well-regarded tour of newer, lesser-known Git features, and it is among the most-watched engineering talks of 2024.

Scott Chacon's FOSDEM 2024 talk on lesser-known Git tips and tricks: useful config settings, older and newer commands, monorepo and big-repo features, and recent GitHub additions. It closes with why he is now building GitButler, followed by a Q&A.

“Great tech talk covering some of the newer lesser-known git features” (HN, 2025)

1 recommendations · 3 citations · Talks · intermediate

4 Hacker News comments

From the HN archive; up to 20 kept per video, favoring different commenters. Recommendations first.

@craftkiller Sep 2025 Recommends
on HN thread Show HN: Downloading a folder from a repo using rust
Read more
You could do a blobless or treeless clone [link] Combined with --depth=1 and the --no-checkout / --sparse-checkout flow that the GP already described. I just tested on the emacs repo, left column is disk usage of just the `.git` folder inside: Shallow clones (depth=1): 124K: Treeless clone depth=1 with no-checkout 308K: Blobless clone depth=1 with no-checkout 12M: Treeless clone depth=1 sparse checkout of "doc" folder 12M: Blobless clone depth=1 sparse checkout of "doc" folder 53M: Treeless clone depth=1 non-sparse full checkout 53M: Blobless clone depth=1 non-sparse full checkout 53M: Regular clone with depth=1 Non-shallow clones: 54M: Treeless clone with no-checkout 124M: Blobless clone with no-checkout 65M: Treeless clone sparse checkout of "doc" folder 135M: Blobless clone sparse checkout of "doc" folder 107M: Treeless clone with non-sparse full checkout 177M: Blobless clone with non-sparse full checkout 653M: Full regular git clone with no flags Great tech talk covering some of the newer lesser-known git features: [this video]
Covers newer lesser-known git features.

Citations, criticism and jokes

@diarrhea Feb 2024 Cites it
on HN thread Git tips and tricks
I remember watching your FOSDEM talk on YouTube, where you asked whether people have rerere turned on _and_ know what it is, in one question. I have it on, but only the faintest of clues what it is! Just git things, I suppose. [this video]
FOSDEM talk asking whether people know and use rerere.
@azangru Jul 2024 Cites it
on HN thread Deno 1.45: Workspace and Monorepo Support
> I'd say that perhaps Git is unsuitable above certain thresholds on numbers of files Scott Chacon in a recent talk about git[0] said that Microsoft uses git to version control Windows. They have ~3.5 million files in the repo, which is about 300 gigabytes in size. There are some tweaks to improve git performance in those scenarios; but still, I'd say it's a pretty impressive threshold. [0] - [this video]
Says Microsoft uses git for Windows with 3.5 million files.

Video list and Hacker News comment labels from HackerTube (prompted by @karpathy), released under ODC-By 1.0, built on the open-index/hacker-news archive. Hacker News data is provided by Y Combinator; comments remain the work of their authors. Video titles, channel names and thumbnails belong to their creators and are shown via YouTube. HackerTube Watch is an unofficial edition. Data export of 2026-10-31.

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