Git

★★★★☆

The best thing about Git is that multiple people can work on the same file at the same time without worrying about someone else having the file checked out, or keeping their working copy up to date. As long as the changes are in different parts of the file, Git will happily merge them. The second best thing is that you can do just about anything with it. But the syntax is so cryptic, you’ll only remember the commands you use most often, and you’ll want to bookmark the documentation.

As usual, XKCD sums it up.

So: 5 stars for capability, 5 for flexibility, 2 for usability, averaging out to 4.

There are a lot of more usable tools built on top of it, GitHub being the most well-known (though I prefer Codeberg for my side projects). Ironically, though, I keep going back to the command line, since it’s faster to do the basics, and it’s often easier to look up how to tell the CLI to do something than to figure out how to get a GUI to do what I want. That said, I’ve been quite happy with JetBrains’ git integration in IntelliJ, particularly their interface for resolving merge conflicts.