I see something strange like:

http://github.com/zoul/Finch.git

Now I'm not that CVS, SVN, etc. dude. When I open that in the browser it tells me that I did something wrong. So I bet I need some hacker-style tool? Some client?

(I mean... why not just provide a ZIP file? Isn't the world complex enough?)

What happens when the repository owner has not prepared a zip file, and you just want a download to use yourself? There is an answer and you don't need to go though that horrid process to download software, install and register keys and whatnot on GitHub, etc.!

To simply download a repository as a zip file: add the extra path '/zipball/master/' to the end of the repository URL and voila, it gives you a zip file of the whole lot.

For example,

http://github.com/zoul/Finch/

becomes:

http://github.com/zoul/Finch/zipball/master/

It then gives you a zip file to download.