Git

One of my favorite Git tricks is shoveling changes to a Git diff and then applying them later. ...

What is a programmer but a series of PRs (pull requests)? I optimize PRs to introduce the best code I can, be easy to review, and document my work so I can make sense of it in the future. Here are some things I always check before opening a PR. ...

Git has two kinds of commands: “porcelain” and “plumbing”. ...

Git prevents branches with the same name. But sometimes, I want to re-use a name! Here’s my workaround. ...

“Keep binaries out of version control” is a truth I’ve always held, but I recently learned more about why. ...

Sometimes I’ll be looking at a Git commit online, and want to put my dev environment in a world where the commit is un-applied. This can be achieved by applying it in reverse. ...

Today I solved a mystery: a file was being Git-ignored in a new project that didn’t have a .gitignore. Here’s me learning this by trying and failing to add it: $ git add destroy.sh The following paths are ignored by one of your .gitignore files: destroy.sh This output tells me some .gitignore is telling Git to ignore my script. Another way to confirm this is the check-ignore command: $ git check-ignore destroy.sh destroy.sh The output here is the match; a file named destroy.sh is indeed being ignored. But how? We can answer that question with the -v flag: ...

Need to undo a code change? You could revert. Or, you could apply the patch without creating a commit. That’s what I want to do much of the time. Use git apply with the -R (reverse) flag: git show 8cc13b1 | git apply -R All the changes from 8cc13b1 get applied to your working directory. In a large commit, do this tactically by limiting to just one file or directory. git show 8cc13b1 src/fileToRevert.ts | git apply -R

Some code is broken, and you can’t figure out why. Maybe there are a lot of changes, and identifying the breaking change seems impossible. Or, maybe you’re curious about how things break in your organization. The tool you need is git-bisect. ...

You’ve been working on a big set of changes, and haven’t committed to Git yet. Now, you want to commit some, but not all, changes to a file. Let’s look at adding patches. ...