I always assumed that if you’re diff’ing the working directory against the last commit (i.e. Compare with Unmodified), both sides of the diff would be read-only. Turns out, only the last commit (left-hand side) is read-only.

For example, suppose you’ve made some quick edits in Program.cs (see yesterday’s tip), and you’ve opened the diff in the Editor by right-clicking and clicking Compare with Unmodified, you can still make edits on the right-hand side.

In this example, I’ve added a Console.ReadLine(), as anyone who has ever created a throwaway console app knows why. (I thought at one point in VS 20 year history if you switched from debug to release, the console app persisted until you closed it, but it looks like that’s no longer the case)

As soon as you hit save, you can confirm via the command line that Visual Studio is being honest that you can edit changes on this right-hand side.

• Git(Hub) Tip of the Day 2017