Hi, I’ve got myself stuck on an issue, I’ve started a big rebase (I know that was already a bad idea to begin with, but, just in case, the information I’m looking for could always come in handy in other occasions), I reordered a few commits and squashed some, while in the process I resolved a few conflicts, then after I resolved one of them and got to the next conflict I realised that I shouldn’t have put a certain commit there, is there a way to rewind the process to the previous step while staying in the rebase? That way I could move the commit to where it should be and continue.
I know you can edit the todo (git --edit-todo
), but that only works for the next commits, I also can’t just reset back by the number of commits I want, e.g. git reset --hard HEAD~4
, because for the rebase those commits remain as done and doing git rebase --continue
only brings me to where I am already, the next conflict to resolve.
So I wonder, is there a way to move out commits of the done list back into todo? Also for example if I trashed an unmerged file completely while messing around, so I can get it back to its initial state, this would be extremely useful
This is what
cherry-pick
does for me. Now that the work is all done, I cancherry-pick
the commits into the new branch in any order I find convenient (and often in an order that causes fewergit
conflicts, or nogit
conflicts to resolve.)Note that this approach is much stronger if the original commits are fairly focused and purposeful.
In extreme cases, I stop and rebase the new or old branch to clean up the commits before I
cherry-pick
them onto the same branch.In essence, all of these techniques are just ways for me to very slowly and methodically organize thoughts, using
git
.Also, sometimes it’s all too messy and I just copy and paste all the change I need into a fresh clean branch.