Git in five minutes: why you need it

No installation here, and almost no commands. This chapter answers one question: why you need a separate program to keep the history of your files when you could just copy the folder. If the answer is already obvious to you, skim it and move on to chapter 2.

The folder that remembers nothing

Open a folder that holds a document you have been editing for more than a month. Odds are it looks like this:

$ ls -1
report.docx
report_final.docx
report_final_v2.docx
report_final_v2_actually_last_edits (1).docx
report_final_v2_actually_last_edits.docx
report_old_DO_NOT_DELETE.docx

Six files, one document. There are three questions this folder cannot answer.

Which file is the latest? The names do not tell you: "final" turned out to be older than "ac