I found a useful Git one liner buried in leaked CIA developer docs • Hacker News Board

Re: I found a useful Git one liner buried in leaked CIA developer docs

#61

Post by phailhaus » Fri, Feb 20, 2026, 3:13 PM UTC

sclangdon wrote: post #56

rw_panic0_0 wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

how do you trust the code claude wrote? don't you get anxiety "what if there's an error in tui code and it would mess up my git repo"?

Isn't it this case no matter who wrote the code? How do you ever run anything if you're worried about bugs?

When I write the code myself, I'm not worried that I snuck a `git reset --hard` somewhere.

Re: I found a useful Git one liner buried in leaked CIA developer docs

#62

Post by sidsud » Fri, Feb 20, 2026, 3:13 PM UTC

morissette wrote: post #14

[flagged]

agree, this just seems click-baity. if you're familiar with the UNIX Way, this is a one-liner you'd naturally write. CIA leaked docs mention and a blog post for this?

Re: I found a useful Git one liner buried in leaked CIA developer docs

#63

Post by puzz » Fri, Feb 20, 2026, 3:14 PM UTC

Sesse__ wrote: post #58

You probably want git-dmb (dmb = delete merged branches) for a safe and more comprehensive way of dealing with this.

Or git-old-branches/git-recent from git-plus

https://github.com/tkrajina/git-plus

Disclaimer, I'm the author ^^

Re: I found a useful Git one liner buried in leaked CIA developer docs

#64

Post by ihsoy » Fri, Feb 20, 2026, 3:15 PM UTC

Dont most git instances, like github, delete branch after a PR was merged, by default?

I am not sure under what usecases, you will end up with a lot of stale branches. And git fetch -pa should fix it locally

Re: I found a useful Git one liner buried in leaked CIA developer docs

#65

Post by gritzko » Fri, Feb 20, 2026, 3:16 PM UTC

oniony wrote: post #40

gritzko wrote: post #24

Speaking of user friendliness of git UI. I am working on a revision control system that (ideally) should be as user friendly as Ctrl+S Ctrl+Z in most common cases. Spent almost a week on design docs, looking for feedback (so far it was very valuable, btw) https://replicated.wiki/blog/partII.html#navigating-the-hist...

Have you tried Jujutsu? If you want to make a better VCS, your baseline should be that, in my opinion, because it already deals with a lot of the Git pain points whilst be able to read and publish to Git repositories.

The idea of using git as a blob storage and building entire new machinery on top is definitely a worthy one. At this point though, the de-facto baseline is no doubt git. If git as a store withstands the abuse of jj and jj becomes the industry standard, then I would agree with you. Also, at that point they may drop git backend entirely just because of price/performance discrepancy. git is overweight for what it does, if they make it do only the bottom 20%, then things will get funny.

Still, many oddities of git are inevitable due to its underlying storage model, so it makes sense to explore other models too.

Re: I found a useful Git one liner buried in leaked CIA developer docs

#66

Post by PunchyHamster » Fri, Feb 20, 2026, 3:18 PM UTC

dietr1ch wrote: post #54

Wait, why would the update for the silly master->main change be swapping the excluded regex instead of just excluding both?

coz OP has agenda and

> Since most projects now use main instead of master

some delusions to boot

Re: I found a useful Git one liner buried in leaked CIA developer docs

#67

Post by cristoperb » Fri, Feb 20, 2026, 3:20 PM UTC

KPGv2 wrote: post #37

firesteelrain wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you explain TUI? I have never heard this before

[flagged]

I don't know when the term became widespread for gui-style terminal programs, but the wikipedia entry has existed for more than 20 years so I think it is an older term than you imply.

https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Text-based_user_i...

Re: I found a useful Git one liner buried in leaked CIA developer docs

#68

Post by micw » Fri, Feb 20, 2026, 3:20 PM UTC

I recently let copilot create a document with a few helpful git commands and that particular one was the one it came with as solution for exactly this case.

Re: I found a useful Git one liner buried in leaked CIA developer docs

#69

Post by plqbfbv » Fri, Feb 20, 2026, 3:20 PM UTC

ihsoy wrote: post #64

Dont most git instances, like github, delete branch after a PR was merged, by default? I am not sure under what usecases, you will end up with a lot of stale branches. And git fetch -pa should fix it locally

In Github it needs to be explicitly configured (Settings > General > Delete head branches after merging), Gitlab is the same.

A lot of my developer colleagues don't know how git works, so they have no idea that "I merged the PR" != "I deleted the feature branch". I once had to cleanup a couple repositories that had hundreds of branches spanning back 5+ years.

Nowadays I enforce it as the default project setting.

Re: I found a useful Git one liner buried in leaked CIA developer docs

#70

Post by nightpool » Fri, Feb 20, 2026, 3:21 PM UTC

ihsoy wrote: post #64

Dont most git instances, like github, delete branch after a PR was merged, by default? I am not sure under what usecases, you will end up with a lot of stale branches. And git fetch -pa should fix it locally

`--prune` will delete your local copies of the origin's branches (e.g. `origin/whatever`). But it won't delete your local branches (e.g. `whatever` itself). So PRs that you've worked on or checked out locally will never get deleted.