sgbeal

> What happens if you make a mistake while committing - maybe forget the file, or commit wrong one?

Then you have proven that you are human.

> Fossil has no way to fix it, by design,

As an 18-year-long contributor to fossil i can assure you that this is absolutely not true. Fossil can amend any checkin and it can move checkins to other branches. Go to sqlite.org/src/timeline?r=mistake to see many examples of where human failing has been both demonstrated and accounted for without breaking anything.

> Not using an IDE in 2026?

Emacs. Uninterrupted since the 1990s.

> Always use the “refactor” tool in your IDE instead of trying to change every instance of a variable name by hand.

That _is_ the refactoring tool in my IDE (emacs). i demonstrated replacing _all_of them at once, not replacing them each by hand.

> ... because it’s the right thing to do and doing it without the tool confers no benefit and is prone to error.

There was nothing in my post done "without the tool." Shell/find/perl _is_ the tool for C refactoring, and has been for decades.

> Any half decent IDE will change them automatically for you, no need to chase them down

It's long been my experience that that only works with high-level languages (specifically, those with bytecode), not C (especially once symbols are generated from macros). (OTOH, i've not touched an IDE in well more than 10 years.)

Also, it's long been my experience that any half-decent IDE is still a pale shadow of Emacs.

> It hasn't been 10+ years

:-?

My "10+ years" was not referring to any specific milestone. It was referring to the general flow of time. It's been 10 years since 2016, twenty since 2006, and more than 40 since writing my first program. Lots has changed every 10 years in that period, both in my skills and the environments i program in, but shell/emacs/makefile remains a staple of that process.

> In my experience CDs and DVDs I burned myself have a lifespan even shorter than floppies. Most of the CDs I burned in the late 90s/early 2000s are already unreadable.

Similar here: CDs and DVDs burned from 2000-2006 or so were, without exception, illegible by 2015. It's sickening.

> These days I feel I am the only one that hasn’t changed their way of writing software at all.

If you mean using a text editor, a shell, and a makefile, then you're not alone by any stretch of the imagination.

If you mean your skills stagnated 10+ years ago and have not advanced since then, then... yeah, you might be the only one ;).

> I changed some variable names and I had to chase down all the places they were referenced,

   $ find . -name '*.c' -exec perl -i -pe 's/\btheOldName\b/theNewName/g' \{} \;

> My first attempt at restoring 1991 Learning Company Spellbound for DOS for my children is dubious. Despite being stored nowhere near magnetic sources, there are read errors on the 3.5 inch floppies and Linux could not mount them.

FWIW, it's long been my experience that floppies (like CDs and DVDs) have a half-life and they degrade quickly upon reaching it. You'd have been lucky to be able to recover those in 2001. Now? If at all, only high-end forensic tools could recover them.

> only interact with people using an official email address.

And then google whether the domain is associated with phishing attempts. i've been targeted several times recently by folks with "official" email addresses but whose domains are (per google) strongly associated with phishing.