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Git Reversing Changes

Links: 106 Git Index

Discarding local changes (unstaged and tracked)

  • git restore is a new command that has been introduced in Git 2.23 together with git switch.
  • Their purposes are to simplify and separate the use cases of git checkout that does too many things.
  • git checkout can be used to switch branches (and also to create a new branch before switching to it). This functionality has been extracted into git switch.
    • git switch cannot be used to go to specific commits. This can only be done by git checkout
  • git checkout can also be used to restore files to the state they were on a specified commit. This functionality has been extracted into git restore.
  • Discarding local changes can still be performed by git checkout but the new commands are easier to use and less confusing.

Discarding commits

Reset

Example: Hard Reset

  • Initial state:
    • attachments/Pasted image 20220610211031.jpg
  • git reset --hard HEAD~1 : rewrites history
    • attachments/Pasted image 20220610211101.jpg
Even in case of a hard reset the commit is not deleted

Revert

  • While resetting works great for local branches on your own machine, its method of "rewriting history" doesn't work for remote branches that others are using.
  • In order to reverse changes and share those reversed changes with others, we need to use git revert.

Example

  • Initial state:
    • attachments/Pasted image 20220610211251.jpg
  • git revert HEAD:
    • attachments/Pasted image 20220610211317.jpg

Last updated: 2022-06-10