Three everyday git scenarios

You may remember Ralph's post on git basics from a little over a year ago. In this post, I'll share three things I've learned are possible (and practically painless) to do with git that go beyond the basic add, merge, push, and pull. Everything in this post is done from the command line.

Scenario 1

You're working on a project with others. These hardworking colleagues of yours just pushed a bunch of commits and you want to see exactly what they changed since your last commit.

What to do

Use git diff. Besides using it to show unstaged changes, you can also use git diff to show changes between any two commits. Suppose that after your last commit, your colleagues made 4 commits. To see the changes, use git diff HEAD~4 HEAD or git diff HEAD^^^^ HEAD. If you don't want to count how many commits there were, you can look up the abbreviated commit IDs (SHA-1 hashes in hex) using git log --oneline. Then, you could use something like git diff 54180a8 129ec44.

There's a lot more to git diff: you can use it to compare specific files, you can show differences at the word level rather than at the line level, etc. If you want to learn more about it, see its page on the git website. If you're working on LaTeX files, git-latexdiff is convenient: given any two commits, it will produce a PDF file showing the changes, with removed text striked through and in red, and added text underlined and in blue.

Scenario 2

You were in the zone, hacking away at multiple issues and successfully completing all of them. Well done, you! Wait—each issue should have its own commit...

What to do

Use interactive staging: use git add -p or git add --patch to add the file or files. Git will look at each file you want to add and split the changes into hunks. For each hunk, it will show you the diff and ask you what to do with it:

Stage this hunk [y,n,q,a,d,/,s,e,?]?

Here is the full list of options. They're pretty easy to remember, especially if you're a vi user who is used to navigating with HJKL.

y - stage this hunk
n - do not stage this hunk
q - do not stage this hunk or any of the remaining ones
a - stage this hunk and all later hunks in the file
d - do not stage this hunk or any of the later hunks in the file
g - select a hunk to go to
/ - search for a hunk matching the given regex
j - leave this hunk undecided, see next undecided hunk
J - leave this hunk undecided, see next hunk
k - leave this hunk undecided, see previous undecided hunk
K - leave this hunk undecided, see previous hunk
s - split the current hunk into smaller hunks
e - manually edit the current hunk
? - print help

git add -p is a powerful command that helps you keep your commits reasonably sized. It does require some care, though, since each individual commit should be consistent.

Scenario 3

You have to stop working, but you haven't finished fixing the issue you're working on.

What to do

You should do something because you don't want to have a dirty working directory.

Option 1: commit now, then use git commit --amend (introduced in Ralph's post) once you've finished what you were working on. git commit --amend is useful for a bunch of other things, like adding files you forgot to stage to a commit and fixing typos in a commit message.

Commits are local, so what should you do if you're worried about hardware failure? If you're working on a personal project, it may be acceptable to push this commit and later push the amended commit. You'll need the -f (--force) flag for the latter push. If you're working on a project with others, however, it would be bad practice to amend a commit that you've already pushed. Instead, you could create a temporary personal branch, commit your changes to this branch, and push it to the remote repository. Then, you could push the amended commit to this branch without worrying about rewriting anyone else's history and merge it with the main branch when you've finished fixing the issue.

Option 2: shelve your changes with git stash, which will sweep away both staged and unstaged changes, leaving you with a clean working directory. You can stash changes more than once. To see all stashes, use git stash list. To re-apply the most recent stash you made, use git stash pop. By default, git stash excludes new files (that haven't yet been staged) and ignored files. git stash is also useful when you want to see upstream changes made by someone else, but aren't ready to commit your work.

There's much more you can do with stashes: apply one stash to multiple branches, delete stashes you no longer need, stash parts of a file, etc. Stashes are always local; they can never be pushed to a remote repository. Atlassian has a good, detailed tutorial on git stash.

Some books you may (or may not) find useful.