Some people claim that Git's killer feature is its index. What's the index you ask? You can think of it like a staging area before you actually commit a change. If you change a file, you must "git add" the changes to the index, then commit the change. This makes committing a three stage process:

1. Modify files
2. Add the modifications to the index (git add [files])
3. Commit the modified index (git commit)

Having to do this three stage process on each checkin seems silly (yes, I know about git commit -a, and the benefits of the index). But all I want to do is commit a change. I don't want to have to think about the index, staging, and all the other little things. Call me lazy.

Git then pissed me off when I tried to check in a file with extra whitespace. It flat out refused to let this happen.

# git commit
* You have some suspicious patch lines:
*
* In test.py
* trailing whitespace (line 20)

Why is the VCS inspecting the contents of my code? Shouldn't it be totally agnostic to the contents of the file? This is just a standard out-of-the-box installation of Git on Windows. I haven't customized a thing. Frustrating.