other git tips

This is mostly for my own benefit, but here are some git commands that I’ve found useful:

• simplified git log showing 1-line description of commits:

  git log --pretty=oneline

• simplified git log showing tree structure of git repo:

  git log --graph --simplify-by-decoration --pretty=format:'%d' --all

  for more complicated logs, use gitk --all

• deleting a local branch (in case you muck around with a branch too much and can’t seem to get things to reset properly with ):

  git branch -d the_local_branch

  when doing this, make sure you’re on another branch (i.e., you’re not on the branch you want to delete)

• renaming a local branch:

  git branch -m old-branch-name new-branch-name

• preventing merge from executing a fast-forward:

  git merge --no-ff

  This is useful when you’re trying to merge in a feature branch and, even if it’s fast-forward change, you still want it look like a merge in the git tree structure (because it’s helpful in understanding the commit history and will affect how things show up in gitk or in git log).

• fetching changes that might have been rebased before using:

  git pull --rebase

  Good description of why this is useful is here. Basically it protects against conflicts that might have resulted from rebase changes like squash, etc.

• remove a file from being tracked (and showing up in git status):

  git rm --cached path/to/file

  still shows up in working directory, but now git status will marked it as untracked