This feels like a stupid question, but there’s plenty of techniques out there that more expert coders use that I don’t know about. How do you preserve minor or major changes you may have made to a script made by someone else while still being able to update any new changes they have? Besides the obvious way of saving your changes somewhere and reinserting them.
The software for this is called ‘git’. The general term for this family of software is “source control”. There are many types of source control but git is massively popular.
All the changes are recorded in a “repository”. At any time you can add your own changes to your repository or import changes others made to theirs. Git takes care of merging the changed files together and warning you of anything it couldn’t merge because of conflicts. It’s pretty magical.
Git was originally written by Linus, the guy who made the Linux kernel.
That should give you plenty to google!
For little snippets of CSS like user styles, git is probably overkill…?
Yeah, I have an account for access and have looked at git stuff before and understand the general idea, but it’s still advanced for my ancient programming experience. What I’ll probably do is just use something like Notepad++ and its compare addon to look at the new vs. what I have and see if it’s just easier to patch manually rather than redo my additions. That’s how I’ve done code in the past, and it’s not like these are huge files.