Thanks for your thoughtful dig into these commands.<p>Perhaps my biggest point of confusion with git comes from that nebulous intermediate structure which sits between the real working directory and the real repository, which sort of acts like a repository and sort of acts like a working directory. It has many names and no clear purpose, and it doesn&#x27;t fit into my mental model of the work to be done when working with a VCS.<p>Your explanation of merges makes more sense from that context. I don&#x27;t think of add&#x2F;mv&#x2F;rm as operations on the nebulous repository, because I don&#x27;t have any idea why one operates on the nebulous repository; what I&#x27;m trying to do is tell git to track a file, or stop tracking a file, or notice that I&#x27;ve moved a file from one place to another. The fact that these operations also kind of half-commit changes to this semi-repository is just... confusing, because I don&#x27;t know why one would care.<p>If the pseudo-semi-repository thingy actually made sense, perhaps it would seem more natural that add&#x2F;mv&#x2F;rm do things to it during merges. I suspect the behavior of checkout, reset, and commit might also make more sense; as is, they seem to be needlessly complex, because I am never manipulating the semi-repository on purpose: I&#x27;m either trying to move my changes from the working directory into the local repository, or I&#x27;m trying to update my working directory to match the local repository, but in no case am I ever trying to half-update the intermediate state I can&#x27;t actually see.<p>Given this somewhat confused explanation and the fact that you&#x27;ve done a great job of explaining what git is doing so far, can you point me at something <i>not</i> written by the git authors that explains what the hell is going on here and why? I would like to understand the tools I&#x27;m using instead of just blindly typing arcane rituals cribbed from the internet, but as I said before trying to read the git documentation just leaves me more confused than before I started.