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Confused by git? Here's a git crash course to fix that 🎉

Chris Achard on September 10, 2019

This was originally posted as a twitter thread: https://twitter.com/chrisachard/status/1171124289128554498 NOTE: if you are looking for a very bas...
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Ekanem

First time hearing about git log --oneline. A truly cleaner way to look at the history.

Thanks Chris

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Jérôme Gully

And there is much more... try
git log --all --decorate --oneline --graph :)

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Chris Achard

Yes! there's a whole bunch :) Here's the full docs if you're interested: git-scm.com/docs/git-log (examples at the bottom)

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Ekanem

Just did it! Thanks.

Now I feel like a 10x developer :)

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Chris Achard

Glad it helped!

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Jamees Bedford

On fire with these recent posts Chris!! 🔥

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Chris Achard

Thanks!

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Jonathan Cousins

The biggest misconception I find (which I couldn’t see listed here) is that a the history is a list of changes. Instead commits are snapshots of the entire repo, not just changes.

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Chris Achard

That's a good point - git is unlike SVN in that way. SVN stores diffs (which is why it can take a long time to calculate the current state when your repo history gets really long), and git stores entire files. I always had thought that git stored diffs as well (since you "commit" just the change, right?) - but nope!

I didn't include it because I find that, in practice, it doesn't matter much whether you think of the commit log as being diffs or snapshots - but I could be wrong... have you found cases where it matters a lot which way you think of it? Thanks!

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Jonathan Cousins

It does when people get comfortable with cherry picking.

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Chris Achard

Ah, good point

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Jonathan Cousins

You have a very helpful article. I would definitely not expect someone new to git to start cherry picking.

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Chris Achard

Thanks! Yeah; maybe on a more advanced course sometime :)

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marko

What is command when changes should be added under pushed commit?

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Chris Achard

If I understand correctly, what you want is to add the extra files to the staging area with:

$ git add FILE

and then you can add them to the most recent commit with

$ git commit --amend

Does that solve the issue?

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marko

Is this also working for remote last commit?
Thank you.

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Chris Achard

If you want to change a remote commit, you'll have to do this, and then push with -f (which is a force push).

HOWEVER! Be careful with force push. If you accidentally force push to the wrong branch, then it can really mess you up, and if you have teammates who have already downloaded a public branch (like master), then force pushing to master isn't a good idea.

If you've already pushed to a public branch, the better choice is probably to just make a new commit.

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marko

I will keep that in mind. Thank you.

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Sebastian Vargr

Git is the expression used for an old angry man.

Either git good, or git’ out.

Either way someone is going to be frustrated.

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Sebastian Vargr

Just realised i missed out on a final pun.

"Either way someone is going to git' frustrated" ...

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Chris Achard

🤣

I love puns

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Jason

I was really getting confused, till I realized I was seeing the word 'comment' instead of 'commit'. Now it makes much more sense! Great article.

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Chris Achard

🤣

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Papidev

Love it, so clear

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Ariful Islam

Pretty good and clear article no doubt. Those who always fail to memorize basic git commands, I make a datatable which name is gitcom. you can check from below link as well.
arif98741.github.io/gitcom/

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Alberto Pertusi

Very good explanation, thanks :)

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Blair Jersyer

nice course...i'm however a bit confused about "stash".. first time i read this. What is that ?

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Chris Achard

Thanks - and yeah, I'm realizing that I didn't explain stash... like at all in the post 🤦‍♂️ oops.

Stash is a temporary place you can put work in progress. Usually, the workflow goes something like this:

  • You are working on something in your working directory

  • a high priority bug comes in. To fix it, you have to switch branches and clear your working directory of the changes you already have made

  • instead of trying to save your work for later in a commit or a special branch, etc, you can put it in the "stash" with git stash

  • Then you go and fix the high priority bug

  • later, you can re-apply what was in the stash with git stash apply or git stash pop (pop will remove it from the stash; apply just brings it back over)

  • then you can continue to work on whatever you were working on from bullet 1.

Hope that helps a bit! I probably should have had a separate point for it in the guide 😀

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Lasha Kakhidze

The major git features, explained so simply, thanks Chris!

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Jérôme Gully • Edited

Best git summary ! Clear, concise, simple illustrations. I already master all these commands, but I never seen a so summary, so thanks. I will spread my team with your post :)

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Omar Gaston Chalas

wow! git log --oneline is amazing

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Jasterix

Great article! I also recommend the atlassian git docs, which helped me get comfortable with git

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AlexCodes

Thank you!! I am currently learning git

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Chris Achard

Glad it helped!

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Julien Camblan

The clearest git cheatseet, thank you! 🙏

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khangprcvn

Wow, thank you.

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Chargoy

Thank you so much for this course, really amazing 👍.