let’s turn this into a constructive angle for future devs and current juniors: just learn git cli, I promise you it is much simpler than it seems.
all those memes about git having like a thousand commands are true, but you really will only use like 7 at most per month.
learn push, pull, merge, squash, stash, reset, im probably missing like one or two
I promise you again: it is much simpler than it seems. and you won’t have to use these stupid git GUI things, and it will save you a hassle because you will know what commands you are running and what they do
short disclaimer: using git GUI is totally fine but low-key you are missing out on so much
im probably missing like one or two
commit. Lol
Every time I mentor a dev on using git they insist so much on using some GUI. Even ones who are “proficient” take way longer to do any action than I can with cli. I had one dev who came from SVN land try and convince me that TortoiseGit was the only way to go
I died a little that day, and I never won her over to command line despite her coming to me kinda regularly to un-fuck her repository (still one of the best engineers I ever worked with and I honestly miss her… Just not her source control antics)
The difference in speed is familiarity, not some inherent efficiency gain by typing commands into the cli.
So I’m normally a command line fan and have used git there. But I’m also using sublimerge and honestly I find it fantastic for untangling a bunch of changes that need to be in several commits; being able to quickly scroll through all the changed files, expand & collapse the diffs, select files, hunks, and lines directly in the gui for staging, etc. I can’t see that being any faster / easier on the command line.
I use gitkraken for two primary purposes:
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Having a visual representation of my project history.
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resolving merge conflicts
Of these, the first is really the only thing I really want a GUI for. I’ll just have it open on my side-screen if I’m managing some more or less messy branch structure or quickly want an overview of what has been done on which branches, where common ancestors are, etc. All the actual doing of things is done from the CLI, because it’s just better for that.
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Personally, I’m pretty good with the CLI version, but sometimes I just use the Code VC interface. For some tasks (basic commit, pull, push) it’s pretty fast. I don’t know if it’s faster than CLI, but I switch between them depending on what I’m doing at that moment. Code has a built in console, so using either is pretty seemless and easy. If you only use the GUI you won’t ever understand it though. I think everyone should start with CLI.
Honestly, this is true for almost everything. GUIs obfiscate. They don’t help you learn, but try to take control away so you can’t mess up, and as an effect can’t do everything you may want.
Checkout
I fucking HATE when abstractions over git use cutesy names that git doesn’t use.
Obligatory mention of file recovery as an option if you get in this situation.I recommend testdisk but there are other more gui friendly options.
NTFS takes a relatively long time to destroy the data so chances of recovery are good on Windows.
Honestly no idea why someone would go around a completely unknown menu in a new unknown editor and randomly click things with caution completely out the window. Not having a copy or trying a blank project, not even reading any messages. I mean even if we don’t know it’s a nuke button, God knows what other edits it could do to your code without you knowing.
This goes beyond rookie mistake. This is something 12 year old me would do. Same with the issue page being 90% swear words.
This is a disease of GUIs. Most people are so used to having their hands held and being unable to make a mistake that when a GUI actually gives you the power to fuck up they don’t expect it. I promise you, if this user was using the CLI, this wouldn’t have happened as easily.
I don’t even know why people ITT are blaming the IDE and completely ignoring this.
When you learn git, you do so on a dummy project, that has 5 files which are 10 characters long each.
An IDE is not made so you can’t break things, it is tool, and it should let you do things. It’s like complaining that Linux will let you delete your desktop environment. Some people actually want to delete your desktop environment. You can’t remove that option just because someone can accidentally do it by ignoring all the warnings.
They could have a warning though. I agree with you, but there are some easy ways to prevent this from happening. It just takes time to implement, and would be required in other places too. Is it worth the dev time? I doubt it.
Linus Sebastian enters the chat
Honestly no idea why editors give shit random names instead of using the terms git uses.
is op stupid ?
I feel bad for this kid. That really is a bad warning dialog. Nowhere does it say it’s going to delete files. Anyone who thinks that’s good design needs a break.
Half the replies are basically “This should be obvious if your past five years of life experience is similar to mine, and if it isn’t then get fucked.” Just adding insult to injury.
I’m not great at English, but “discard all changes” shouldn’t ever mean “Delete”.
In the context of version control it does. Discarding a change that creates a file means deleting the file.
Ok fair enough, but I’m under the impression these files existed before the source control was implemented.
I guess it’s all up to how the program handles existing files.
Also, why not send them to the recycle bin? I never really thought about it before, but that does seem a reasonable UX improvement for this case
I wonder if there’s already a git extension to automatically stash the working tree on every clean/reset/checkout operation…
Because “the underlying Git nukes them right away, so why shouldn’t we perma-delete the files, too?”
Anything else’d be effort…
Honestly it probably just runs the underlying git command
Poor guy basically did a git reset —hard HEAD without even a git repository
Jesus saves, and so should you
If you ever happen to have 5000 uncommitted files, you shouldn’t be asking yourself if you should commit more often. You should be asking yourself how many new repos you should be making.
The person didn’t have any git repository; probably a new programmer that didn’t know how version control works and just clicked discard without understanding what that means in this situation.
This person is why we have that meme where devs would rather struggle for a week than spend a few hours reading the documentation.
This is without gitignore, so probably just installed one js dependency
Fuck around things you don’t understand, find out. Why even go near the source control area and start clicking stuff if you don’t know jack shit about it.
It seems like he was trying to learn though? He clicked it, like “hell yes I want source control, let’s figure this out”
“It says all my files are changed? Oh shit why did it change my files? Shit fuck, undo, how do I undo…Do I want to discard the changes? I don’t even know what it changed. Yes please undo whatever changes you did to my files”
And poof.
Who learns with five thousand files though?
Someone learning JavaScript
Looks like someone forgot about the 3-2-1 rule. Teachable moment.
Go on…
3 backups: 2 different places/media on-site 1 off-site
What about 2 offsite and 1 onsite? That’s been my approach, mostly due to storage limitations onsite.
technically isn’t a vcs supposed to be one of those different places?
Yes, but the OP went 3 months without it and then messed up during setup
deleted a chunk of my work the other day by pressing Ctrl z in windows explorer. my project was without source control installed (cuz it was in Dev stage), and Ctrl shit z/Ctrl y hotkeys didn’t work, so that chunk was just gone, persished forever… or so I though. I remembered vs code having a file history under some panel. found it, and here it was - at least some of the latest history of my file. lesson learned: even in Dev where nothing is yet working, finish your day of coding with a commit to a remote repo.
all I’m learning from these stories is to stay far far away from vscode.
(VS)Code(ium) is great. (VSCode is MS fork of the OSS Codium.) It’s a popular editor with a lot of plugin for just about every language. It has an integrated console. It can do basic Version control (and you can use the console for anything more). It’s my favorite editor/IDE (not technically and IDE, at least out of the box). Just don’t do things you don’t understand. It’s that simple. The OP fucked around, and they found out what it does the hard way. It’s really easy to use if you have a basic understanding of things though.
Makes no sense to me. I’ve never had a single problem. Best ide I’ve ever used.
You can avoid this problem by not doing version control in your code editor. Different programs for different purposes. VS Code is fine for editing code and should not be used to manage an entire project.
I begrudgingly switched to vscode a few years ago. I’ve never had any issues like this with it. My only issues have been with a plugin that I installed optionally (and that was later fixed by the plugin author).
Nah you gotta submit a bug report for that
Typical web developer. He didn’t even know files can be deleted without going into „recycle bin”
Why are we dissing web developers? What is this bullshit elitism?
Look at him. He’s just learned that files can be deleted without going info the recycle bin, and he already wants to be treated as equal. Ha!
I think it’s a joke about how noobs only learn javascript and make blazing fast webapps while knowing nothing about computers.
The real issue is already going 3 months without source control.
The person didn’t have any git repository; probably a new programmer that didn’t know how version control works and just clicked discard without understanding what that means in this situation
I have heard things from another apprentice who just does not use version control at all and the only copies are on his laptop and on his desktop. He is also using node.js with only 1 class and doesn’t know about OOP (not sure if you even use that in js no clue 😅) and has one big file with 20k lines of code I have absolutely no clue how he navigates through it
Ey! Reminds me of my middle-school years! I still can’t belive I made an entire game without a single class… Just storing info in arrays and writing in comments what location represents what data. But I was a literal child, too young to read guides or sit through “long” tutorials.
I don’t want to sound too mean, but whenever I see anything similar at work, I wish that person get a job they’re actually good at. It’s fine and all that the company started hiring actual programmers to fix things, but the fact that the old crew still fucks shit up with senior privileges is a major grievance.
I know the type. Usually the kind of confident know-it-all who refuses to learn anything but delivers changes really quickly so management loves them. I had the misfortune to fix such a project after that ‘rock-star’ programmer left the company. Unfortunately the lack of professional standards in our industry allows people like that to continuously fail upwards. When I left the project they rehired them and let them design the v2 of the project we just fixed.
Jesus, reminds me of a similar story. My gf once lost a job to someone who literally just pasted code into LLMs, also delivering quickly, even tho it was hot garbage. Anyhow, she spent a lot of her time fixing his shit and so her output went down. I hope that company burns to the ground with completely un manageable software.
When I left the project they rehired them and let them design the v2 of the project we just fixed.
Lol. Wow.
And that is why I’ve been unable to work myself out of a job in all my long years as a developer.
My company for the longest time had two engineers they would give all the new projects to. They would rush through some prototype code as fast as they could then management would bring in a new team to take the project over. The code was always garbage and crammed into one place. I kept getting new projects and instead of starting from a nice clean slate we always had to build on that garbage. It sucked so bad.
Those are rookie numbers. I have at least a 35k one somewhere. More than one actually.
People run their businesses on this.
I once landed a job at a small company doing a software for medical analysis labs all over the country. Software had been around for over ten years at this point. They had no source control. Nothing. Absolute nightmare.
They were literally starting to use source control when I arrived.
In 2015.
He just heard monoliths were in again
The reactions here are why people don’t join forums, don’t ask questions, or choose to learn alone. “duh, I knew that”. Yes, the dude didn’t, which is exactly why he’s frustrated. I think too many have forgotten what it’s like to be a beginner and make a fatal mistake, which would explain the mocking responses here and things like recommending new linux users Arch.
I understand the impulse to be empathetic and kind. But it’s very hard to respond in good faith to someone who just made a post where more than half the words are “fuck you”.
There is a difference between someone who is new and experiences something like their IDE deletes a file that was unexpected and asking a question about why it did that.
Then there are arrogant assholes who believe their shit doesn’t stink and that they couldn’t have done anything wrong and it was the IDE’s fault for not knowing what they wanted to do versus what they commanded it to do.
The OP is the latter.
I mean, not entirely, and he says he lost months worth of work. Like imagine you know nothing of git:
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Click buttons in the IDE to add source control.
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IDE says a bunch of files have been changed.
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But I don’t want to make changes to the files, I want to source control them.
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Attempt to undo the changes. Click “discard changes” thinking it will put them back to how they were before clicking add source control. Get a warning dialog that this is not undoable, but that’s fine because I don’t want whatever changes it made to my files anyway.
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All files are deleted and unrecoverable.
Like that experience sucks balls and it’s reasonable that a person wouldn’t expect “discard” == “delete”. Also, from reading the GitHub thread, apparently at that time VSCode was doing a
git cleanwhen you clicked this. Which like…yeah why the hell would it do that lol? I don’t think I have ever usedgit cleanin my entire career.-
He’s right, his shit doesn’t stink. His decision making was reasonable for a new programmer.
