[saghm]

"Just don't accidentally do things wrong" is also the way to avoid null pointer errors, type mismatches in dynamically typed languages, UB in C/C++. It works, until it doesn't, and in practice that happens pretty quickly. Personally, I like things that have proper safety checks.

[nightski]

Except it's not an unrecoverable error. If you do it all it does is add that file to the working index. No commits are made and no harm is done. So no, I do not feel it's the same as a null pointer exception or type mismatch.

[saghm]

> If you do it all it does is add that file to the working index.

No, that's not at all what it's doing!

    git init
    touch foo.txt
    git commit -m 'empty foo.txt'
    echo something >> foo.txt
    git diff --stat # Shows one line added to foo.txt
    git checkout foo.xt
    git diff --stat # empty output; no changes!

It removes changes that are not yet checked in. You can only get them back by going into the reflog (which is pretty much identical to the situation described with `jj edit` at the beginning of this thread; `jj op log` will let you get them back fine).

edit: Actually, I was wrong; the changes will NOT be in the reflog because they were never checked in. It's fully destructive; you've lost the changes and don't have any way of getting them back through git. This is strictly worse than anything possible with `jj edit`, and even when making this point I didn't realize how bad it was, and clearly neither did anyone defending it.

The fact that there have already been two instances of defending git's behavior without even understanding what it's doing with this command is exactly my point. It's not your fault; the command is unintuitive, and that's my entire point. How many times should it take for people to try to explain what's happening incorrectly before we accept this?