Why Git?

To give you an example of how helpful Git can be, I've modified an e-mail I sent to a client. They had customised a library I'd written for them, and I need to fix a bug both in my original version and the modified version of the include file they'd sent me. I did these steps:

1. Create a local repo inside my source directory
2. Commit all the files into the local Git database
3. Create and switch to a new branch called 'test'
4. Save their modified version of main.inc
5. Commit the change in the 'test' branch
6. Switch back to the 'master' branch
7. Fix the bug and commit
8. Switch to the 'test' branch
9. Merge all changes from the 'master' branch

This automatically applies the change from step 7 and commits the change in the current branch. It might seem like a lot of work to apply one change that could easily be done again to a different version of the file, but consider that it scales; even complex changes can be merges with only cursory review required. (Unless both branches have changed in contradictory ways (i.e. same parts of the files have been changed) since the two branches diverged. In this case a merge conflict will happen, which is easy to resolve by "collapsing" each pair of conflicting changes that have been put next to each other in the files that couldn't be merged automatically. A commit is then necessary because obviously it couldn't be done when a conflict was detected.)