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
The main draw to the CLI for me is portability. I’ve been a dev for ten years now and used tons of different editors on different platforms and while each one had a different way to describe the changes, how to commit, or how to “sync” (shudder), the CLI hasn’t changed. I didn’t have to relearn a vital part of my workflow just because I wanted to try a different editor.
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)
If I want to commit a selection of files, but not others, then I’m clicking boxes not typing filenames.
git add -p
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.
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.
For a first step you can get away with just add, commit, push, and pull. Maybe reset, but tbh using git like svn at first is fine.
Next branch, checkout and merge. At this point show, log, bisect and blame also start to be useful.
I’m not a fan of stash, and would instead recommend reflog and cherry-pick as the first two advanced commands to learn. Then rebase and squash.
I use gitkraken for two primary purposes:
-
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.
-
How about Git’s CLI stop being so shit? All of the options are obtuse & usually 3 ways to do the same thing.
Developers should normalize non-Git DVCSs.
Checkout
Clone too 😁
im probably missing like one or two
commit. Lol
And mergetool ?
I don’t use push/pull btw.
5000 files
0 backups
Someone’s got their priorities mixed up.
You have to lose it all to know what matters (speaking from experience 😭)
The real issue is already going 3 months without source control.
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
He just heard monoliths were in again
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.
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.The “source control” when I first started was all the code on a shared drive, to check out a file you copied it to your machine, and renamed the extension on the shared drive to your initials.
When somebody edited without doing this there would be full blown meltdowns over lost work.
Reading this just give me a panic attack
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.
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.
We really need some kind of board like the one that controls the title for engineers.
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.
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.
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
In case anyone else is wondering, or simply doesn’t like reading screen shots of text, this is apparently a real report:
This link was included in the post but I realize that “source” was probably not the best label for it. Updated to make it more clear.
Steps to Reproduce:
1.Go near this fucking shit editor.
2.Commit the deadly sin of touching the source control options.
🤣
The dude ranted for awhile in the issue thread and closed the issue himself too! lol
- Ignore the scary warning VS Code shows you when you press the button.
Pretty sure the scary warnings in big bold text are more recent than this report.
Nope. The scary warning is even screenshotted and used as an example in the post report discussion.
It’s quite the fun read!
Having done exactly 0 research, I going to assume it’s one of those “DO NOT PRESS OKAY UNLESS YOU ARE EXPERIENCED AND KNOW WHAT YOU ARE DOING” and someone went “pffft I know what I’m doing. click now what does this option do…”
reading through it, it sounds like they opened a project in VSCode, and it saw that there was a local git repo already initialized, with 3 months of changes uncommitted and not staged. So the options there are to stage the changes (
git add) to be committed or discard the changes (git checkout -- .). I guess they chose the discard option thinking it was a notification and i guess the filename would be added to gitignore or something? Instead, it discarded the changes, and to the user, it looked like VSCode didrm -rfand not that this was the behavior of git. Since the changes were never committed, evengit reflogcan’t save them.From this issue: https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/issues/32459
It appears that the behavior actually included a git clean. Which is insane in my opinion. Not sure if they changed it since, but there’s definitely a dev defending it.
Yeah, it’s unclear to me at the time if the dialogue box in the screenshot appeared when doing a select all operation, but it reads as though the OP dev didn’t understand git, discarded their work, and got upset that it was an option.
Realistically if the dialogue box appeared, I’m not sure there would be anything else the IDE could do to prevent the dev from themselves. Perhaps reject operations affecting 5000 files? But then you’ll just have someone with the same issue for 4000 files.
The issue I linked has a very good analysis of the UX issues and several suggestions for fixing these. They went with a minor iteration on the original message box, which not only includes a clearer message and the number of files affected, but also defaults to not touching untracked files (while preserving the option to delete untracked files as before).
He said they’re not going to change it, just make the dialog a lot more clear and add a second button to it that will only do a reset without the clean.
The second button is actually a pretty major change!
It appears that the behavior actually included a git clean. Which is insane in my opinion.
Yeah. Building a convenient accessible context free way to run
git clean…sure feels like the actions of someone who just wants to watch the world burn.
4. Complain about lack of scary warning.
I dunno, “discard changes” is usually not the same as “delete all files”
If the “changes” are all your files, discarding them for me means basically delete my files, you know, the ones you are trying to add.
At the same time, OP seems a layman, and might be coming from things like Microsoft Word, where “Discard all changes” basically means “revert to last save”.
EDIT: After reading the related issues, OP may have also thought that “discard changes” was to uninitialise the repository, as opposed to wiping untracked files.
Nowadays the warning even says that this cannot be undone. Maybe that wasn’t present in 1.15, though.
It was. If you go through the OP thread, one of the responses is a picture of the dialog window that this user clicked through saying, “these changes will be IRREVERSIBLE”.
The OP was just playing with a new kind of fire (VSCodes Git/source control panel) that they didn’t understand, and they got burned.
We all gotta get burnt at least once, but it normally turns us into better devs in the end. I would bet money that this person uses source control now, as long as they are still coding.
What exactly do you think discard means?
“Changes” are not the same thing as “files”.
I’d expect that files that are not in version control would not be touched.
Apparently, it means changes to the directory structure and what files are in them, not changes within the files themselves. It really ought to be more clear about this.
Yeah. They did substantially modify the message to make it much clearer, thankfully.
It means both.
“Changes” encompass more than you think. Creating / Deleting files are also changes, not just edits to a file.
- If the change is an edit to a tracked file, “Discard Changes” will reverse the edit.
- If the change is deleting a tracked file, “Discard Changes” will restore it back.
- If the change is a new untracked file, “Discard Changes” will remove it as intended.
It can also be all of them at the same time, which is why VSCode uses “Changes” instead of “Files”.
If the change is a new untracked file
Wasn’t the issue that it deleted a bunch of preexisting untracked files? So old untracked files.
And the terminology is misleading, resulting in problems. shrug.
Yeah. That’s discussed in more detail in the code change that resulted from the issue report.
It’s a ballsy move by the VSCode team to not only include
git cleanbut to keep it after numerous issue reports.As others discussed in that thread,
git cleanhas no business being offered in a graphical menu where a git novice may find it.That said, I do think the expanded warning mesage they added addresses the issue by calling out that whatever
gitmay think, the user is about to lose some files.
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?
I think it’s a joke about how noobs only learn javascript and make blazing fast webapps while knowing nothing about computers.
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!
Jesus saves, and so should you
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.
VS Code could really use some work in that regard and I really do feel bad for that person, but this is also just funny as heck
In fairness, it’s an old issue and they did put in the work to address the issue report.
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.
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
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.
If you have set up your staging area for a commit you may want to discard (unstage) changes from the staging area, as opposed to discarding changes in the working directory.
Of course, the difference between the two is obvious if you’re using git CLI, but I can easily see someone using a GUI (and that maybe isn’t too familiar with git) misunderstanding “discard” as “unstage”.
Either way, what happened here indicates that all the files were somehow added to the VC, without having been committed first, or something like that, because git will not let you discard a file that is untracked, because that wouldn’t make any sense. The fact that the GUI let this person delete a bunch of files without first committing them to the index is what makes this a terrible design choice, and also what makes the use of the word “discard” misleading.
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.
I guess the newly created git repository was empty, and all the files that was present in the folder represented “changes”
I’m pretty sure vscode shows a confirmation dialog when discarding changes will permanently delete a file. I’ve done that recently with temporary files that were no longer needed.
I remember following the drama back in the day. That warning you saw was the result of this now-classic bug report.
the alternative to deleting is emptying the file contents, which is essentially the same…
While I have some sympathy for anyone who loses months of work, as an IT administrator by day, all I have to say about their lack of backups, and lack of RTFM before messing with shit is:
HAHAHAHAHAHAHA HAHAHAHAHA. you got what you deserved fucker. GL.YF.
Yeah, it’s bad enough that it could happen, the fact they allowed that to happen so easily is far worse.
No backup, no sympathy.
Screenshots of git issues are one of my favorite genres of meme
In reality, VSCode has local file history called “Timeline”. It’s enabled by default.
https://github.com/microsoft/vscode-docs/blob/vnext/release-notes/v1_66.md#local-history
In reality, that was added four and a half years after this issue was opened.
Oh, didn’t notice this was a 7 year old issue.
Understandable; no time to check details when your fuse is that short
Say you don’t know how to use git without saying you don’t know how to use git.
Alright you convinced me its time to pick up this skill. How does one best learn git? Just play around with it and break things?
read the official book : https://git-scm.com/book/en/v2
That’s basically how I did it.
To properly learn it using this method, create a directory that contains only text files and sub directories and treat it like a real project. Add files, delete them, play around with updating the repository. Try and go back a few updates and see how the things react. Since it’s not a real project there’s no risk of loss, but you’ll still get to see the effects of what you do.
that’s a necessary step in your learning process, but certainly not sufficient. I’d recommend reading the book, since it shows in greut detail the inner workings of Git along with the basic concepts :
Git doesn’t automatically recursively add all files in the directory to the repository though - VSCode decided that should be the default behavior, while other editors (intellij) ask if you want to add newly created files to version control
That’s how git works. Every file and subfolder under the repo’s root folder belongs to the repo.
That’s what happens when people stumble across that website called GitHub, get hooked and now have unrealistic expectations for the real git.
“I just installed Git for Windows. Where is the drag-to-upload box?”
— A statement dreamt up by the utterly deranged
Real git involves a lot of sweat, requires you to clean up any mess you make, and communicate with any partners about their preferred techniques instead of rawdogging it and waiting for issues. The pushing and pulling will come naturally but you need to know how and when to release, and be clear about how you wish to commit. Nightly is an option but good luck getting everyone on board. People might judge you for using the word “master” but it should be alright in private.
People might judge you for using the word “master” but it should be alright in private.
I snorted. It was my inner 12-year-old’s fault. (Also because of recently some idiots getting up in arms about these terms in technology.)
I’m literally a software dev working for a top company and I can barely use git on the CLI. I do all of my version control operations using a GUI, so there’s no sense in gatekeeping any of that. This is true of both my work projects and personal ones. It’s cool if you prefer the CLI, but it is absolutely not a required skill in order to have a successful and meaningful career.
I agree that the gatekeeping isn’t a good thing, but you should learn at least the basics of the CLI. It will give you a better understanding of what’s going on behind your GUI and makes troubleshooting and fixing problems a lot easier.
Definitely not required but it is absolutely a skill worth having.
It’s absolutely not a skill worth having. If you ever run into issues and need the CLI, you can always get your knowledge right in that moment. If you already can do everything with your GUI and get the same results, getting the knowledge to do it some other way is just wasted time and duplicate work.
involves a lot of sweat, requires you to clean up any mess you make, and communicate with any partners about their preferred techniques instead of rawdogging it and waiting for issues. The pushing and pulling will come naturally but you need to know how and when to release, and be clear about how you wish to commit. People might judge you for using the word “master” but it should be alright in private.
Don’t talk about my mom that way
