I feel you. I was recently hired to help with svn to git migration and Java upgrades from 5-7 to 8 (due to my previous experience with such migrations). When I joined they already had a plan. They told me no one will be using command line. They are currently discussing which GUI to use and everyone will have this GUI installed by default, git command will be discouraged as non-standard approach, windows users will not have git-bash installed. I was asked for recommendation of GUI tooling for git and I had absolutely nothing to say, the only I ever used was Kraken and that was in 2014?. When I offered to train and assist everyone with git command training to make everyone more efficient in industry standardised tooling, they told me that's not in the plan. My job was done there without me having to do doing anything, I was free to leave that job!
Sublime merge would have been a good suggestion in this scenario. It's UI uses standard git terminology and concepts, so you'd have been sneakily trainig them in the command line whilst they used the UI!
It was in a very old fashion and regulated working environment where developers and testers aren't allowed to install whatever they want. Software installers can be whitelisted after a review is done. It included things like: licence OSS vs enterprise, support, community, or even more banal things like stars on github. Adding new software to a list could take literally months - like in case of git GUI client. Sublime was frequently requested but managers were responding "you already can install Eclipse and Intellij, you also have Notepad++, you don't need more editors. More editors installed is a security risk to this company!" (some hackers found a way to run VSCode portable edition which didn't offer updates ;)) This was end of discussion.
This is also why there was so so much fuss about git GUI client, there were looking for a golden hammer, a GUI that would do everything and anything.
The git GUI in Intellij and related products is really quite good. The diff view that shows three adjacent panes for conflict resolution (|theirs ->|merge|<-yours|) is so much better than the normal conflict resolution flow (not least because you still get the normal code highlighting in it), and separate checkboxes for each changed section of the diff makes it so easy to chunk large changes into logical commits. I wish they offered it as a standalone product.
>What was their justification for being like that?
The more tools people are allowed to install and use, the less standardised software development. Meanwhile we didn't even have common source code formatting pattern and single Java class could be formatted with tabs, 2 spaces and 4 spaces.
Not necessarily. On my team at work we have people using Sublime Text, VS Code and vim, but all 3 (+ our CI) plug into ESLint and TypeScript for ensuring style coherence.
