Comment by jmcs@discuss.tchncs.de on Microsoft Please Fix

Ignore the scary warning VS Code shows you when you press the button.

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 did rm -rf and not that this was the behavior of git. Since the changes were never committed, even git reflog can’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.

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!

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).

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.

I dunno, “discard changes” is usually not the same as “delete all files”

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.

“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”.

And the terminology is misleading, resulting in problems. shrug.

I find it difficult to lay the blame with VSCode when the terminology belongs to git, which (even 7 years ago) was an industry standard technology.

People using tools they don’t understand and plowing ahead through scary warnings will always encounter problems.

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.

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 clean but to keep it after numerous issue reports.

As others discussed in that thread, git clean has 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 git may think, the user is about to lose some 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.

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.

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!

4. Complain about lack of scary warning.

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