Coming from Git
How every Git concept maps to its Trellis equivalent and where the models genuinely differ.
If you know Git, you already know most of the Trellis version-control vocabulary. The mapping below covers the day-to-day commands; the section after it covers the places where the models genuinely differ.
Concept map
| Git Concept | Trellis Equivalent |
|---|---|
git add + commit | Automatic. Every file change creates ops in real time. |
git log | trellis log. Causal op stream with content-addressed hashes. |
| Tag / release | trellis milestone create. Narrative checkpoint. |
| Branch | trellis branch. Same concept, with CRDT support. |
git diff | trellis sdiff. AST-level semantic diff. |
git merge | trellis merge. Three-way with semantic conflict resolution. |
| Stash / abandoned | trellis garden. Discovers and revives abandoned work. |
| Issues (external) | trellis issue. First-class task tracking. |
Where the models differ
- No staging area.: Ops are created automatically when files change. There is no "add then commit" ceremony the causal stream records changes as they happen.
- Ops are immutable.: They are never rewritten, rebased, or deleted. There is no
rebase -i, no force-push, no history surgery. Curation happens above the stream (milestones), never to it. - Three-tier ops.: File-level (Tier 0), structural (Tier 1), semantic/AST (Tier 2). Git sees bytes; Trellis also sees the tree.
- Milestones ≠ commits.: A milestone spans a range of ops and carries a narrative message. Commits are both the unit of change and the unit of story in Git; Trellis separates them.
- History is a query.
git logscrolls; the op stream is a graph you can query which decisions affected this file, made by which agents, against what alternatives? - Idea Garden.: Abandoned work isn't stashed into oblivion. Trellis detects abandoned clusters and lets you revive them.
See also
- Quick Start first repository in five minutes.
- Git Bridge import from and export to Git repositories.
- trellis/vcs API the full version-control model.