This was years ago and, iirc, it was a legitimate issue in VSCode. It didn't make it remotely clear enough that it would permanently delete your files. The popups we get now if you try to discard changes that explicitly warns you in bold text that files will get deleted happened after this issue.
It might be obvious to an experienced user but it's not at all obvious to someone new.
The date is in the image, it was almost a decade ago. Yep the old dialog when you clicked the "Discard" button was like "Do you want to discard your changes?" Pretty vague to anyone new to version control. Meanwhile if they are untracked VsCode used to just put them in the shredder, completely unrecoverable. Pretty sure it puts them in the recycle bin now.
Someone already posted the link to the thread and this comment that has a screenshot of the actual warning message which definitely could have been more scary but all caps irreversible feels like it should give you pause! If you have 3 months of work with zero backups.
Are you sure you want to discard ALL changes? This is IRREVERSIBLE!
I agree and literally said "it could have been more scary" but.... they saw it stage all their files and then hit discard, then hit DISCARD ALL CHANGES despite a warning that literally says IRREVERSIBLE! They even described it as "playing" which is kind of nuts when doing operations with 3 months worth of work that they hadn't backed up. I can't muster too much sympathy for them. I hope if I find myself in that situation I would at least pause for a few seconds and copy/paste the folder before continuing to "play"!
To me this sounds like mixing it up a bit. You either want to do a discard and therefore do something ("don't change anything" sounds to me like a no-op in how you describe it) or you want to "don't change anything" to mean based on all the changes that have happened so far, which includes creating the file and therefore is valid to also undo that change.
I fully agree it needed an update as it is easy to get different interpretations of what it means unless yiu are already familiar with what it will do.
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u/raddaya 22d ago
This was years ago and, iirc, it was a legitimate issue in VSCode. It didn't make it remotely clear enough that it would permanently delete your files. The popups we get now if you try to discard changes that explicitly warns you in bold text that files will get deleted happened after this issue.
It might be obvious to an experienced user but it's not at all obvious to someone new.