> Want to know what we saw developers doing instead? They either duplicate code files or took screenshots of relevant code while in the middle of a change. Even I have done something similar before: I'm about to mess this up... I'll Ctrl-A and Ctrl-V this into a new tab before it gets too messy, and then I can put the window beside my editor to use as a reference. I even observed a professional developer with 20 years experience doing this!
I do this kinda stuff all the time in my digital art practice. Duplicate a layer, hide the duplicate, start making changes. Does it work better? Awesome, delete the duplicate. Did my idea not improve it after all? Cool, delete the new version and rename the duplicate back.
It's simple and reliable and builds easily on existing structures.
I made a similar comment and now I recognize that what we’re doing is branching outside version control. And I also recognize it’s still sensible to do, and that to the extent version control feels like friction this is yet another case where the interfaces to it aren’t good enough.
And I don’t just mean “git cli is a bad ux” (though I mean that also), but that the whole world of version control is poorly serving rapid prototyping and other exploratory flows.
It’s pretty likely aliases could serve some of this by wrapping a lot of fast paced idea checkpoints into a set of git actions. But it still would be disruptive for eg any intermediary file system side effects if it’s not faster than whatever watcher you have running.
if git was just ctrl+s or something similar (i.e. no more than a single keyboard shortcut sequence) then this whole problem would disappear, but because even in vscode it's "navigate to source control tab, ctrl+enter, enter enter(if something is not saved) "type some stuff" enter" it's too much to save "tiny" changes. not to mention reverts are a hassle.
because of this comment I just decided to create a keyboard shortcut for commits to be alt+cc so now it's a little easier, I still need to type a commit message and accept save and stage, but at least it's all doable from the keyboard.
I do this kinda stuff all the time in my digital art practice. Duplicate a layer, hide the duplicate, start making changes. Does it work better? Awesome, delete the duplicate. Did my idea not improve it after all? Cool, delete the new version and rename the duplicate back.
It's simple and reliable and builds easily on existing structures.