Useful git commands that I always forget

Here are a couple of git commands I always seem to forget. I’m writing them down, so I can stop googling them every time (doubt). You probably have these commit-ted to memory, but my brain refuses to stash ‘em.

Basic but essential

Pull changes and rebase my commits on top

No merge commits needed - keeps history looking tidy.

git pull --rebase origin main

Interactive rebase for the last 2 commits

git rebase -i HEAD~2

Undo the last commit but keep the changes

git reset --soft HEAD~1

Quickly stash/un-stash changes without a message

I have to jump branches a lot at work.

git stash
git stash pop

See what I’m about to commit

Just gotta be sure…

git diff --staged

Create a new branch

There’s other newer ways to achieve this, but this is the one command here that actually lodged itself into my brain.

git checkout -b [branch_name]

For when you’re feeling ~fancy~

Reset to a better state

Sometimes you need to blow away your changes.

git reset --hard HEAD

And sometimes you messed up your local branch and want to get it back to the state it’s at on the remote.

git reset --hard origin/[branch_name]

Clean up references locally that are gone from remote

git fetch --prune [remote]

git revert [commit-hash]

Undo the changes in a commit

Create a new commit, reverting changes from the specified commit. It generates an inversion of changes.

git revert [commit-hash]

Grab a specific commit from another branch

git cherry-pick [commit-hash]

Pray you don’t have to use these

Show a log of all reference changes

Lifesaver when you’ve really messed up and need to recover a lost commit or branch. Is it ref log or re-flog? 🤔

git reflog

Start a binary search

Finds which commit introduced a bug.

git bisect start