RE: Suggestion: make git checkout safer

["Randall S. Becker" <rsbecker@nexbridge.com>]

On June 3, 2015 1:35 PM Junio C Hamano wrote:
> Ed Avis <eda@waniasset.com> writes:
> > If my personal experience is anything to go by, newcomers may fall
> > into the habit of running 'git checkout .' to restore missing files.
> Is that really true?  It all depends on why you came to a situation to
have
> "missing files" in the first place, I would think, but "git checkout
$path" is "I
> messed up the version in the working tree at $path, and want to restore
them".
> One particular kind of "I messed up" may be "I deleted by mistake" (hence
> making them "missing"), but is it so common to delete things by mistake,
as
> opposed to editing, making a mess and realizing that the work so far was
not
> improving things and wanting to restart from scratch?

When working in an IDE like ECLIPSE or MonoDevelop, accidentally hitting the
DEL button or a drag-drop move is a fairly common trigger for the
"Wait-No-Stop-Oh-Drats" process which includes running git checkout to
recover. My keyboard is excessively sensitive static, so this happens more
often than I will admit (shamelessly blaming hardware when it really is a
user problem). Git checkout is a life-saver in this case as is frequently
committing. :)

Cheers,
Randall

-- Brief whoami: NonStop&UNIX developer since approximately
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-- In my real life, I talk too much.