git

Last updated on Oct 18, 2023

git is such an amazing piece of software. It has some complexity to understand it, but once it clicks, you cannot live without it.

Learning resources

The best tutorial I found of git is the playlist Git and Github for poets - The Coding Train. For real, git is normally not explained clearly to beginners and Daniel Shiffman does a great job here.

Also, there are a couple sites that worth checking:

This response of Stackoverflow is clear and concise.
An excellent git cheatsheet per area.
Which has also a decision tree on how to resolve a git mess.
Bitbucket has a good guide on how to resolve merge conflicts.
This article has a nice longer explanation.
This explains what is origin
A more advanced resource, the FreeCAD wiki has a good overview about the source code management.

Using `git`

You should use standard git commit messages

Like this:

$ git log --oneline -5 --author pwebb --before "Sat Aug 30 2014"

5ba3db6 Fix failing CompositePropertySourceTests
84564a0 Rework @PropertySource early parsing logic
e142fd1 Add tests for ImportSelector meta-data
887815f Update docbook dependency and generate epub
ac8326d Polish mockito usage

This is a nice article explaining the why.

This is a blog post explaining the how.

If you want a reminder, you can check this GitHub Gist about setting up a .gitmessage file.

clean the merged branches from your local

For POSIX compliant OSes

git branch -d $(git branch --merged=master | grep -v master)
git fetch ---prune

source: this medium post

if you have nushell shell installed

git branch --merged | lines | where $it !~ '\*' | str trim | where $it != 'master' and $it != 'main' | each { |it| git branch -d $it }

source: this script

delete a branch locally and in the remote

// delete branch locally
git branch -d localBranchName

// delete branch remotely
git push origin --delete remoteBranchName

instead you want to delete a file which is currently tracked?

Of course you can do

rm .\this-file.txt
# and then
git add .\this-file.txt

but

git rm .\this-file.txt --cached

does the same. The --cached part does delete the file from the index (adding it to staging area of the next commit), but doesn’t delete the file on your computer.

Keep the file on the repo, but don’t track newer changes

That’s git update-index –skip-worktree file1.txt is for

you can see the differences with a specific commit

git diff 5eba8a

create a new branch and switch to it

instead of doing

git branch -b newFeature
git switch newFeature

you can do

git checkout newFeature

branches

git branch -m oldName newName               # rename a branch
git branch -d goodbye_branch                # delete a branch locally
git push origin --delete goodbye_branch     # delete a remote branch
git branch                                  # list local branches
git branch -a                               # list all branches (local and remote)

did you make changes in main?

Don’t worry, git stash is here to rescue

git stash

git checkout correctBranch
git checkout -b ifYouWantToCreateANewBranch

git stash pop

If you don’t want the stash anymore, you can git stash drop to delete the topmost stash.

do you want to roll back git changes?

All right, easy. There is always a solution:

If you want to throw away all the changes on the current status and return to HEAD, write:

git reset --hard HEAD

Or, if you want to change history and leave a note that you did it, the revert command will create a commit that reverts the changes of the commit passed to the terminal. You can use it to revert the last commit like this:

git revert <commit hash to revert>

source: git revert commit - how to undo the last commit

Tips and tricks

Make your log history prettier

Instead of git log and scroll away the changes, use:

git log --graph --pretty=format:'%C(bold red)%an%C(reset) - %C(bold blue)%h%C(reset) - %C(bold green)(%ar)%C(reset) %C(white)%s%C(reset) %C(dim white) %C(bold cyan)%d%C(reset)'

source: this blog post.

Speaking of which…

Show `git diff` with style

Install delta and copy this into your home user ~./gitconfig file.

delta sample

also, you can see the diffs with the commits messages

with

git show

you can use shortcuts to checkout “next-to-last” commit

Instead of git checkout main

# ^ means 'first parent commit,' therefore the second-most recent commit in the main branch
git checkout main^

# If it's a merge commit, with more than one parent, this gets the second parent
git checkout main^2

# Same thing as three ^ characters - three 'first-parent' steps up the tree
git checkout main~3

# The first commit prior to a day ago
git checkout main@{yesterday}

# The first commit prior to 5 minutes ago
git checkout main@{5.minutes.ago}

source: here

Tools

You can convert markdown task lists into issues in GitHub

see source

RepoZ is a pretty nice software

RepoZ gif https://github.com/awaescher/RepoZ

this post comes from github, view it here

git