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Which git commands do you struggle with?

Ben Halpern on April 20, 2022

Which git commands and concepts do you have a hard time wrapping your head around and using regularly? And with the commands you struggle with: Do...

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Lucia Cerchie • Apr 20 '22

I struggled with git-cherry-pick so I wrote a tutorial on it github.com/Cerchie/git-cherry-pick...

Ben Halpern • Apr 20 '22

Nice!

Rense Bakker • Apr 21 '22

I struggle with the existence of git cherry-pick :p

Arif RH 🎮 • Apr 20 '22

Nice sir. Thanks!

Alain D'Ettorre • Apr 20 '22

Rebasing: concept is clear, I can do a dead simple rebase, but rebasing in general is a struggle, so much that I almost always end up merging. My bad, I know.

Isaac Lyman • Apr 20 '22

I support you, it's okay to merge. (I also don't really understand rebase)

csgeek • May 7 '22

rebase just pulls in the changes from a branch and keeps your changes on top. if you do a -i with rebase it lets you squash, reorder commits and a bunch of other things. It's very powerful IMO.

Isaac Lyman • May 7 '22

So is it the equivalent of making a fresh branch off of the other branch, then cherry-picking all your commits back onto it? E.g.:

git checkout working-branch
git commit -m "My commit"
git rebase main

git checkout working-branch
git commit -m "My commit"
git checkout main
git checkout -b new-working-branch
git cherry-pick {commit hash of "My commit"}

csgeek • May 7 '22

Sure, but if you have 15 commits on your branch you'd have to cherry-pick all 15s. rebase is much easier to use, but it is equivalent if you want to use that.

It has other features (squash, reorder, etc) which are really handy that I mentioned earlier though for the standard behavior that is equivalent.

Chris Watson • Apr 23 '22 • Edited

I can handle interactive rebasing, but it does sometimes get you in a muddle. The thing is, you have to solve all the same conflicts as a merge, just not all-at-once and it keeps the history cleaner.

Jan Küster • Apr 21 '22

Rebase is so underrated but also so hard to grasp, which is why also often use merge or squash merges.

Nicholas Stimpson • Apr 20 '22

It's not so much the individual commands as the entire philosophy. And the multiple commands that do the same thing. Or nearly the same thing. Or almost the same command that does something entirely different. So you're left feeling like "You're in a room with multiple exits, all the same".

Ben Halpern • Apr 20 '22

Have you considered using a tool or abstraction that helps? Just curious.

Nicholas Stimpson • Apr 20 '22

I use TortoiseGit mostly. And eGit in Eclipse. And I used to use SourceTree. They all help a bit. But when things go screwy, I inevitably end up back at the command line.

Michael • Apr 21 '22

At least when you enter a wrong command you don't get eaten by a Grue

matthew-salerno • Apr 20 '22 • Edited

revert has screwed me over a couple times. I think I get it now but it took a couple painful lessons to learn that it was not "revert back to this commit" but was actually "revert this commit and keep future commits." I ended up deleting my working commits and keeping my broken ones 😂🥲😭

sandeshsapkota • Apr 21 '22

do we have this command in git ! really ?

matthew-salerno • Apr 21 '22

Yup the man page even tells me not to do exactly what I did. Although it's not as bad as I made it sound as it doesn't actually remove the commit, it just makes a new one that makes it as if the commit never happened.

sagefright • Apr 23 '22

Agreed, I recently went on a rant about revert and got it all out of my system.
twitter.com/AndyHails/status/15103...

Murtuzaali Surti • Apr 20 '22

The commands which I don't use often!

Om Bhamare • Apr 22 '22

Lol

Garrett Mills • Apr 21 '22

A lot of submodules stuff feels... suboptimal for end-users. One that gets me occasionally:

Clone repo with submodules & initialize submodules
Edit file in a submodule and commit/push it
Commit disappears into the ether.

This is because submodules check out a detached head instead of a branch, so committing on top of the head doesn't make the commit the new head of the branch... so next time you pull it disappears.

Amelia Gapin • Apr 22 '22

I will NEVER grasp submodules. Every time someone at work brings them up as a suggestion, I run away

ytjchan • Apr 22 '22

Can git reflog show the commit hash?

Wormhole Cowboy • Apr 20 '22

Kept forgetting to pull after adding a readme on Github. Then I wouldn't be able to push because of conflicts, so I had to learn how to use rebase.

John Peters • Apr 21 '22

Visual Studio Code has a plug-in named GitLens. It is so good that I don't issue git commands any longer.

It includes rebasing,
auto resetting to any commit, changing the head pointer, full Visual commit history with code drill down ability to see modifications. Not to mention syncing, pushes and pulls, commits and branching.

Matthew Ondash • Apr 21 '22

Oh for sure! Interactive rebase with GitLens is the bees knees! And managing branches and stashes has never been easier. Pair it with the Git Graph extension and it's a whole new world :D

John Peters • Apr 21 '22

It's helped me out of terrible messes I did to my local and remote repos many times.

Roneo.org • Apr 20 '22

git commit --fixup

sagefright • Apr 23 '22

WTF?1 Just read about this as a result of your comment. What is the point?!

Taz • Apr 20 '22

Since I code pretty much every project on my own, I regularly use the git rebase command which is a very powerful git command since it gives you the flexibility to modify local commits. Although hard to learn initially, it does get easier to use over time.

However, I wouldn't recommend to use such git commands in a group project setting as that could likely lead to "loose ends" in the git repo history (i.e. branch conflict issues) which can be a massive pain to deal with if you ask me.

Thomas Hansen • Apr 24 '22 • Edited

Jeff Bezos has a rule; "Two pizza should be sufficient to comfortably feed a software development team". So what on earth does this has to do with git you may ask?

Well, if your git branches ends up looking like a x-mas tree, or guitar hero (LOL!), this is a symptom of complexity, often originating from the size of your team, resulting in that you've got too much "administration overhead". People that initially sees Magic's source code, are often shocked to see the sheer number of projects (40+), without realising that by segregating its projects to such an extreme extent, it's much easier to segregate teams into smaller more easily managed chunks of code, again resulting in that you can create smaller autonomous teams, not interfering with each other, making it easy to "feed each team comfortably on 2 pizzas".

Conclusion? If your git branches looks like "guitar hero", you're probably doing something wrong elsewhere in your organisation. Rethink the way you're working, find the underlying symptom, and watch your "x-mas tree automatically turn into a Redwood tree" ... ;)

Akshay Mahajan • Apr 21 '22

Alot of common git commands are ok to grasp like merge, rebase, cherry-pick, reset etc. But the command I think I currently struggle upon is interactive rebase when people who don't understand where rebase excel and ruin the history with alot of merge commits.

Diego (Relatable Code) • Apr 20 '22

git rebase. On a larger level it can be quite annoying how different projects handle the way they want to handle git history only for it to be rarely referenced.

Akshay Kannan • Apr 20 '22

Had a hard time wrapping my head around git rebase after learning git merge.

Tawhid • Apr 20 '22 • Edited

well it was,
git stash, which makes a temporary, local save of your code
& git bisect, a function that allows you to hunt out bad commits
but now I don't :D