#git the program that represents the repos. it's like twenty years old and was originally made for tracking the development of linux

[lactose-intolerant-nihilism]

Okay, I'll give it a shot; git is a program. You use it to make a git repository (which is in practice just a folder with some metadata).

The repository stores series of commits. Each commit stores a series of changes made since the previous one - files which have been added, files which have been removed, and changes which have been made to existing files.

(It stores them in branches, which have separate histories, but to begin with you'll just be dealing with one 'main' branch.)

You can then 'push' commits from this local repo to a remote repo, often on a service like GitHub, so the commit history can be shared between different devices, people, etc.

Doing any of this directly with git itself in the command line involves giving it a complicated series of commands in a specific order, often starting with the most complicated stuff before you can get to the simple stuff. In practice, you'll generally be using another program as a wrapper over git; which git client you use is mostly a matter of preference. On Windows good places to start could be the GitHub desktop client, which abstracts a lot of the more complicated bits away, or the default Git Gui which comes with Git for Windows, which maps more directly to whats happening on the command line (but with clearly laid out buttons instead of hard-to-memorise syntax). You shouldn't need to drop down to the command line until you're needing to do more complex stuff.

Start with the basics of getting something versioning, then you can work up into branches and all that if and when you need to. Each step is much easier once you've got a firm footing in the previous one.

Can someone explain to me in like five seconds how to use git, assuming that I know basic shit about coding/command line/whatever but don't know any of the specific terminology related to git. Like every tutorial online is at the same time both over my head and also vastly too basic. Just like. Tell me what it is.

Uh. First tell me its ontology. Is it a program, a standard, a language...? I know that it's for version control. Suppose I wanted to do version control at a piece of code. What do I do. What buttons do I press, on my computer? Tell me these things.