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Visual deck · 10 scenes · 23 animation beats
Git, visually
An animated walk through Git: commits as snapshots, branches as sticky notes, merges with two parents, push and pull, and the daily loop. Ten scenes, no jargon first.
By Sitraka Forler · Lecturer, Durham Business SchoolUpdated 3 October 2026 About this site
Most Git tutorials start with commands. This deck starts with the picture: a commit is a snapshot of every file, a branch is a sticky note on one of those snapshots, and a merge is a snapshot with two parents. Once you can see that, git log, git checkout and git merge stop being magic words.
It is the deck I use in the first hour of the IT essentials course. One click or one key press advances one animation beat, so you can pause on each idea and say it back in your own words before moving on.
How to drive it
- Click or tap anywhere, or press Space or the right arrow: one press is one animation beat, so you can narrate between reveals.
- Left arrow or right click goes back one beat. Escape leaves the deck.
- The position is kept in the address bar (#scene.beat), so a link lands on the exact beat you were showing.
The 10 scenes
- 1A project folder, and the problem of "final_v3_really_final.py"
- 2A commit is a snapshot, not a diff
- 3The chain of commits, and what HEAD points at
- 4Branches are sticky notes that move
- 5Switching branches changes the files on disk
- 6A merge commit has two parents
- 7Fast-forward versus a real merge
- 8Remote, push and pull: two chains that sync
- 9The daily loop: pull, branch, commit, push, pull request
- 10What a conflict is, and why it is not an error