I 
git git. No, seriously... I've also used several git clients over my short lifetime, my current favourite is the awesome and beautiful (and beautifully cross-platform) gitkraken tig (ncurses git client) - although if I had to choose a gui git client it would definitely be gitkraken.
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Full disclosure: I am the AUR (Arch Linux User Repository) package maintainer for gitkraken (standalone version for air-gapped networks and labs). |
However, sometimes I need to do stuff that's just easier in git bashon the command line. Below are several of these commands that I always seem to forget (dang you nice git client - making me forget my terminal roots...).
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git reset back to a previous commit
Sometimes you might want to take a local branch back to a previous commit (or state... like in between several amend commits) without actually reverting commits.
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git reset --hard HEAD |
Reset specific file to previous commit version
From time to time you may need/want to reset a specific file to a version in a previous commit. What you essentially want to do is "checkout" the file from said commit:
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git checkout <COMMIT-HASH> -- path/file |
For example, suppose I want to check reset the current file found in the path (relative to the git root foler) "i3/config", I would do:
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git checkout 3b5e3ff7ab0c3d61984532950a1c7acfe3f9efa6 -- i3/config |
where 3b5e3ff7ab0c3d61984532950a1c7acfe3f9efa6 is the commit hash (you can also use the "short" hash 3b5e3ff).
Create orphan branch
In some instances you might need/want to create a branch which is not based on another branch. This is known as an orphan branch. Some git front-ends provide a nice way of doing this but many (even good ones) do not. No matter, you can always create one from the command line, like so:
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A few times I've needed to perform certain operations on every commit of a branch in history (like say delete a file that shouldn't have been added to the repo). In my a recent case, I was actually separating out multiple code bases from one big repository into several smaller repositories. Luckily, the repository contained separate folders, where each folder (which contained separate and independent projects), so . So basically I just had to move these folders into separate repositories... while keeping all history for the specific folder only.
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git prune |
(use 'git prune -n' to see what commits will be pruned without actually pruning).
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