Some git-fu I’ve been finding particularly useful recently:

  1. Untangling concurrent changes into multiple commits: git add -p is the greatest thing since sliced bread. But did you know it features an ‘s’ command which allows you to split a hunk into smaller hunks? Now you can untangle pretty much anything.
  2. Splitting a previous commit into multiple commits: I’ve been finding this one useful for quite a while. Start with a git rebase -i, mark the commit(s) as edit, and once you get there, do a git reset HEAD^. All the changes in that commit will be moved out of the staging area, and you can git add/git commit to your heart’s content. Finish with a quick git rebase --continue to the throat.
  3. Fixing your email address in previous commits: I often make a new repo and forget to change my email address. (For historical, and now silly, reasons, I like to commit to different projects from different addresses, and I often screw it up.) Here’s how to do a mass change: git filter-branch --env-filter "export GIT_AUTHOR_EMAIL=your.new.email.address" commit..HEAD, where commit is the first commit to be affected. Of course, changing the email address of a commit changes its id (and the id of all subsequent commits), so be careful if you’ve published them. (Also note that using --env-filter=... won’t work. No equal sign technology.)
  4. A git log that includes a list of files modified by each commit: git log --stat, which also gives you a colorized nice histogram of additions/deletions for each file. This is a nice middle ground between git log and git log -p.
  5. Speaking of git log -p, here’s how to make it sane in the presence of moves or renames: git log -p -C -M. Otherwise it doesn’t check for moves or copies, and happily gives you the full patch. (These should be on by default.)
  6. Comparing two branches: you can use git log --pretty=oneline one..two for changes in one direction (commits that ‘two’ has that ‘one’ doesn’t); and two..one for the opposite direction. You can also use the triple-dot operator to merge those two lists into one, but typically I find it useful to separate the two. Or you can check out git-wtf, which does this for you.
  7. Preview during commit message: git commit -v will paste the diff into your editor so you can review it while composing the commit message. (It won’t be included in the final message, of course.)
  8. gitk: don’t use it. You’ll get obsessive about merge commits, rebasing, etc., and it just doesn’t matter in the end. It took me about 4 months to recover from the bad mindset that gitk put me into.
William Morgan, October 28, 2008.
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