git

Today I learned that you can use the --patch parameter with several git commands. The --patch parameter is probably most known for interactively staging changes from the cli, but I’ve never really used it because I find GUI clients are much more convenient for this. But apparently you can also use it with restore/checkout to grab specific changes from another branch. git restore --source=branch-name --patch This is something I haven’t seen easily done in any git client....

Today I learned that git has a $GIT_DIR/info/exclude file can contain additional patterns of files to ignore but isn’t committed to the repository. For me this is handy for some tooling configuration files that I use personally but don’t want to clutter the main .gitignore of the repo. If there are some files that you want to always ignore, then you can specify a global ignore file in your git config with core....

I discovered that a reword option was added to --fixup back in git 2.32 The basic command looks like git commit --fixup=reword:<commit> and you can use it like you would the other autosquash commands. I recommend creating an alias for it though. Thanks to this post, I’ve had a fixup alias that uses fzf to select form recent commits so I created a similar one for reword: [alias] reword = "!...

I’ve reviewed quite a few pull requests in recent years and I’ve noticed some less-than-ideal practices when it comes to creating merge commits so I thought I’d list some things you can do to make life a little easier for someone reviewing your code. Make the commit message as useful as possible A lot has been written about how to write good commit messages, but I rarely see the advice applied to merge commits....

Today I learned that sh is not the same thing as bash.

I just recently learned that you can actually cherry pick a range of commits instead of just a single commit: git cherry-pick c1..c3 The above is using the two-dot range notation (..). I was a bit surprised by this because I thought that this was the purpose of rebase --onto — to take a series of commits and apply them one at a time on top of some other commit....

Today I learned that in Git 2.36, the --remerge-diff option was added to git show. This effectively lets you view any merge conflicts that occurred during a merge commit and how they were resolved. So for instance, git show --remerge-diff <commit-message-id> would show something like: Under the hood, it recreates the merge with the conflicts and diffs it with the merge commit so the conflict markers are shown in red since the merge commit removes the conflict markers during resolution....

Today I learned about the git maintenance command that runs tasks for regular maintenance of a git repo. If you run git maintenance start in a repo, git will create scheduled tasks to run at regular intervals to perform these tasks in the background like garbage collection. This will optimize and speed up the repo without having to tack them on occasionally as you run other commands. A particularly handy task it will run every hour is prefetch, where it does a git fetch but only pulls down the data and doesn’t update any refs....

Today I learned that ORIG_HEAD is a reference that git maintains to the previous commit HEAD pointed to before it “was modified in a drastic way”. The docs mention these operations as examples of when ORIG_HEAD is updated: (git am, git merge, git rebase, git reset) This is useful when you want to undo one of those operations. You can use git reset --hard ORIG_HEAD (or --keep) to put your branch back to where it was before the operation....

This is probably a very niche use case, but I learned today that you can abbreviate commands that git populates in the todo list during an interactive rebase. So it’ll look like this: p deadbee The oneline of the commit p fa1afe1 The oneline of the next commit You can enable this with git config --global rebase.abbreviateCommands true. To be clear, you can always use the abbreviated commands, but since I use Vim to edit the list, it makes it slightly more convenient to edit the commands....