JetBrains "local history" for InteliJ IDEs has saved me several times. It has all of the diffing tools that are available for git commits. This looks to be a generic implementation of that. We should not live in a world where unsaved data is lost.
Dura is a background process that watches your Git repositories
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Re: Dura is a background process that watches your Git repositories
#42Git has a built-in Ctrl-Z that is called “reflog”. Acknowledging that git’s UI commands such as “reflog” may be technical, and nonstandard, and poorly named, does dura provide something that git doesn’t, and is it a good idea to add yet another application/layer/dependency to the git workflow? Would it be just as effective to add a git alias called “undo”, or something like that?
that's tangential to this tool though. the reflog is for any git changes. this is a tool that checks for changes every 5 seconds or so and commits them to a shadow branch. there are a few things that standard git will clobber too without any recourse from the reflog.
> there are a few things that standard git will clobber too without any recourse from the reflog.
True! Stash is one of those things, right? Does dura catch the stashes specifically? Clearly it’ll catch whatever work you did before stashing, but if it saved stashes specifically in it’s own thing, that would be extra handy.
Re: Dura is a background process that watches your Git repositories
#43Along similar lines, I've adopted a hyper-frequent commit pattern in git. I do a bunch of meaningless micro-commits as I'm making progress, and then rewrite them all into one or two meanginful commits once I've reached a working state of whatever I was trying to do. I find it's helpful for not losing work / easily backing up if as I'm going along I realize I want to change approach. (For the micro commit I have a git…
Do you have those commands handy by chance? :D
It's usually something like:
git status && git add -A git commit -m "checkpoint" --no-verify
Re: Dura is a background process that watches your Git repositories
#44Along similar lines, I've adopted a hyper-frequent commit pattern in git. I do a bunch of meaningless micro-commits as I'm making progress, and then rewrite them all into one or two meanginful commits once I've reached a working state of whatever I was trying to do. I find it's helpful for not losing work / easily backing up if as I'm going along I realize I want to change approach. (For the micro commit I have a git…
This workflow sounds similar to the one we use at my company! I use the git-ps tool we made to make stacks of usable micro-commits, and using the tool to keep things logical and working as things change and the code develops. https://github.com/uptech/git-ps
Re: Dura is a background process that watches your Git repositories
#45Along similar lines, I've adopted a hyper-frequent commit pattern in git. I do a bunch of meaningless micro-commits as I'm making progress, and then rewrite them all into one or two meanginful commits once I've reached a working state of whatever I was trying to do. I find it's helpful for not losing work / easily backing up if as I'm going along I realize I want to change approach. (For the micro commit I have a git…
I've tried that as well. For me it was really difficult as I use the current changes quite a lot, and it makes it a lot more difficult to grasp the work I've done so far without having a meaningful change set.
I keep a draft PR open to keep track of this. Not has nice as vs-codes diff tool though.
Re: Dura is a background process that watches your Git repositories
#46I used to run a simple rsync script that copied all my active projects to an external drive every 15 minutes. I figured that if I had a major issue, I'd only lose a limited amount of work, which I could probably re-create without too much trouble.
Lately, I've been using private branches in the early stages of feature development, but you still have to remember to push in case of hardware failure. I also rely on my IDE's local history to get back to a good place if I need it.
I wonder if it would be good to combine these ideas: commit and automatically push every N minutes. Is this something that's being considered for Dura? Or is it a bad idea?
One big challenge must be avoiding commits when someone's right in the middle of typing, although having to stitch a couple adjacent commits together would definitely be better than losing work.
Re: Dura is a background process that watches your Git repositories
#47Earlier quoted context omitted.
Reflog is a log of refs. If you don’t make commits then then nothing is added to the ref log.
True, fair. I was about to delete my somewhat dumb question. Yeah I guess if someone’s not saving early & often, this could definitely catch some mistakes.
It’s not dumb, I had the same question. Would’ve been great if the value proposition explained how it was different than using the reflog.
In my experience there’s a lot of Git tools out there that basically exist because people don’t want to read the manual. But seems like Dura is not one of those.
Re: Dura is a background process that watches your Git repositories
#48Cool tool! It's kind of insane to that in 2022 were still dealing with "save early, save often." Our tools are so antiquated. Storage is cheap and computers are fast, every keystroke should be persisted somewhere I can recover from rather than having to manually save and commit works in progress.
Well, it's funny because the Apple stuff works like this, but not Xcode.
I pretty much never save anything with Page/Numbers/TextEdit. I just quit
Not only do I not lose changes, I don't lose editions. I can go back to older versions. And that's not including Time Machine. It's simply "built in".
From a user experience, it's really wonderful and no stress. I don't even think about it. At the same time, I have no idea where these extra versions are stored but, honestly, I don't care.
I do wish other applications worked similarly. Source code is tricky, but it probably wouldn't be awful to have a similar experience.
Re: Dura is a background process that watches your Git repositories
#49I used to run a simple rsync script that copied all my active projects to an external drive every 15 minutes. I figured that if I had a major issue, I'd only lose a limited amount of work, which I could probably re-create without too much trouble. Lately, I've been using private branches in the early stages of feature development, but you still have to remember to push in case of hardware failure. I also rely on my I…
Automatic commits is generally not a good idea. Commits are supposed to be meaningful chunks of work, and meaning requires manual effort.
Automatic pushing is also probably not great. If it's just a backup mirror of some kind maybe, but otherwise you should be doing something like intentionally pushing what you're trying to share.
I don't really think that backups should be tied to git. There's already good backup software, wiring it into git doesn't seem to add anything.
Re: Dura is a background process that watches your Git repositories
#50Hmmm...rm -fr .git Now what?
I use Time Machine on an external drive. I learned this lesson the hard way… Obviously it’s not perfect, but you aren’t going to lose an entire days work.