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.
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.
