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.

[–] [email protected] 42 points 4 hours ago (2 children)

I'm not great at English, but "discard all changes" shouldn't ever mean "Delete".

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 hour ago

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.

[–] Michal 25 points 3 hours ago (2 children)

In the context of version control it does. Discarding a change that creates a file means deleting the file.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 hour ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 hours ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 hour ago

I guess the newly created git repository was empty, and all the files that was present in the folder represented "changes"

[–] [email protected] 32 points 5 hours ago (2 children)

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

[–] murtaza64 2 points 3 hours ago

I wonder if there's already a git extension to automatically stash the working tree on every clean/reset/checkout operation...

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 hours ago (1 children)

Because “the underlying Git nukes them right away, so why shouldn’t we perma-delete the files, too?”

Anything else’d be effort…

[–] alphapuggle 6 points 1 hour ago

Honestly it probably just runs the underlying git command