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.
It's so fucking infuriating that so many devs act like this. "This should've been obvious!" Fuck off, that's an unhelpful statement. "You should've been using version control! No backup, no sympathy!" Fuck off, they were literally trying to begin using version control for backups.
Even half the comments on this very Lemmy thread are disparaging this dev. I wonder how many actually read the thread and found that there was a bug discovered causing this feature to delete files not even associated with git?
But, congratulations to them, I suppose. Congratulations on making fun of someone. I hope it makes them feel powerful. 🙄 Devs can be so toxic.
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.
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.
Came here to say this. No one deserves this, not even new programmers who try to learn things.
Some programming tools are really powerful compared to what new users are used to. If you come from the world of Microsoft Office and Apple whatever it's called, everything is saved automatically to cloud and there is some local backup file somewhere which you can just restore. Modern programs are designed to protect users against their own mistakes, and when suddenly that is taken away, it can be a jarring experience.