I'm sure Magit is lovely. But I can't resist sharing the story of my bad experience with it over a decade ago (which has left me scared away).
It was maybe early 2012, and I was excited to try Magit. I got it set up, and called 'M-x magit-init' from a source file I was editing. My understanding was that this would create a new git repo in that source file's directory, ending up with something like "/home/beautron/myproject/.git".
But something else happened. The git repo was put here instead: "/home/beautron/myproject/~/myproject/.git". Note the peculiar "~" directory, created inside the project directory.
Huh. Weird. Well, let's get rid of this mess and try again. I went to the project directory in my bash shell, typed "rm -r ~", and hit enter. Somewhere between my mind firing the signal to hit enter, and enter actually being hit, I realized with horror what this command would do. But it was too late to cancel the brain signal.
I didn't lose everything, because I had not typed something worse like "rm -rf ~", and somewhere in my home directory tree was a read-only file. So the command only deleted so far as that file, and then paused to ask for confirmation.
I estimated I lost about half of everything (the first half of the alphabet was gone from my home directory). The most frustrating thing was not even being sure what all I had lost. On the plus side, this experience improved my regimen around backups.
As I was trying to salvage the wreck of my system, I had a separate laptop out on the side, where I was trying to get some help, or maybe just some sympathy, from the #archlinux irc channel on freenode. But the two people who responded to me on the channel were very snarky to me. I felt they thought I was clearly an idiot for having run that command.
The irc people refused to believe that Magit created the "~" directory. They were convinced I had done that myself, with some other series of stupid commands. (If you had to guess the source of weird "~", who would you choose: the established Magit project, or the guy who just deleted half his home directory?)
But a short time later I was vindicated! From Magit's github issue 383, Feb 29, 2012:
> So if you're editing "~/Temp/foobar/boo.txt" and call "M-x magit-init" which defaults to "~/Temp/foobar", instead of creating a git repo in "/Users/jimeh/Temp/foobar" it creates it in "/Users/jimeh/Temp/foobar/~/Temp/foobar".
Sorry to hear. Codes have bugs that evolve over time. I hope you try magit again some day. It is sometimes hard to remember to apply correct quoting in a shell, so if in Emacs you can also use dired for dealing with such errors in less risky ways.
It was maybe early 2012, and I was excited to try Magit. I got it set up, and called 'M-x magit-init' from a source file I was editing. My understanding was that this would create a new git repo in that source file's directory, ending up with something like "/home/beautron/myproject/.git".
But something else happened. The git repo was put here instead: "/home/beautron/myproject/~/myproject/.git". Note the peculiar "~" directory, created inside the project directory.
Huh. Weird. Well, let's get rid of this mess and try again. I went to the project directory in my bash shell, typed "rm -r ~", and hit enter. Somewhere between my mind firing the signal to hit enter, and enter actually being hit, I realized with horror what this command would do. But it was too late to cancel the brain signal.
I didn't lose everything, because I had not typed something worse like "rm -rf ~", and somewhere in my home directory tree was a read-only file. So the command only deleted so far as that file, and then paused to ask for confirmation.
I estimated I lost about half of everything (the first half of the alphabet was gone from my home directory). The most frustrating thing was not even being sure what all I had lost. On the plus side, this experience improved my regimen around backups.
As I was trying to salvage the wreck of my system, I had a separate laptop out on the side, where I was trying to get some help, or maybe just some sympathy, from the #archlinux irc channel on freenode. But the two people who responded to me on the channel were very snarky to me. I felt they thought I was clearly an idiot for having run that command.
The irc people refused to believe that Magit created the "~" directory. They were convinced I had done that myself, with some other series of stupid commands. (If you had to guess the source of weird "~", who would you choose: the established Magit project, or the guy who just deleted half his home directory?)
But a short time later I was vindicated! From Magit's github issue 383, Feb 29, 2012:
> So if you're editing "~/Temp/foobar/boo.txt" and call "M-x magit-init" which defaults to "~/Temp/foobar", instead of creating a git repo in "/Users/jimeh/Temp/foobar" it creates it in "/Users/jimeh/Temp/foobar/~/Temp/foobar".
Source: https://github.com/magit/magit/issues/383
It was a long night (and I had to leave on a trip the next morning). Now it's fun memory, perhaps with a number of lessons in it.