git

I just learned that git reset has a --keep parameter. This works the same as --hard except that it won’t discard any uncommitted changes. It’s meant to be used when we want to remove some of the last commits in the current branch but if there could be conflicts between the changes in the commits we want to remove and our uncommitted changes, then the reset is blocked. I’d been using git reset --hard and just double checking I didn’t have anything uncommitted but I’ll be defaulting to --keep except if I’m intentionally trying to clear out my changes....

You can search through git history not only by the text of a commit message but by the contents of the diff of commits. This is commonly referred to as the git pickaxe and you invoke it with the -S parameter to git log i.e. git log -S 'public void SomeMethod and you’ll get every commit that touched that method signature or even one that deleted it. Some git clients will expose this as an option in a search field but if that fails the git cli lets you include additional filters like author or file path or even use regex with the --pickaxe-regex switch....

The Git Extensions git client is actually pretty powerful and has a lot more features than I thought. I’d seen others using it before but never looked into it until I saw a StackOverflow answer suggesting to use Git Extensions to view the git reflog… a feature I’ve only ever seen in Smartgit. Some nice features I noticed while playing with it for a bit: View commits from the reflog in the log view (makes it really easy to recover commits) Option to view First Parent only in the log view Stage individual lines Option to launch external editor for commit message The commit message window can autocomplete file names Show/Filter any number of branches in the log view Windows file explorer integration Completely free and open-source and cross-platform I think I still prefer Smartgit over Git Extensions but it’s tough to recommend Smartgit since it requires a license for Commercial use so I’m always keeping an eye out for good free options to recommend to others and now Git Extensions is my new recommendation (much better than SourceTree)....

If you’ve ever worked on a project with me then I’ve probably recommended at least one of these config settings in git. git config --global pull.rebase true - tells git to always pull with rebase instead of merge (the equivalent of pull --rebase). This not only saves you having to type the flag every time, but also ensures gui clients will also use rebase when pulling. Note: You should only enable this if you’re comfortable with rebasing....

In my opinion Git hooks are an incredibly useful yet under-utilized feature of git. There are lots of resources that go into hooks in detail but here I’m just going to list some of the ones I find myself using over and over again. prepare-commit-msg This hooks is great for templating your commit messages. This post does a great job of highlighting some powerful possibilities. I like to use it to automatically insert a ticket number from the current branch name....