In the past few weeks I’ve been doing alot of Git and alot more collaboration with people on projects! So i wanted to point out some of the things i’ve learned and some handy tips I picked up.

I was aimee remotely and she showed me how to “stage” a commit. Which is a way to indicate “HEY this is going to be commited when you do git commit!” I used to always do commit -a which adds all the files not currently in the staging. I used perforce for awhile and learned how nice it was to have a “change list” and how you can commit only certain files at a time. Git seems like you can only have one “change list” at a time but that is fine in most cases.

git add -p

It will go through each changed file and ask if you want to stage this hunk. We were able to see what files we had changed as it showed a diff. You can confirm or deny chunk by chunk. today I like to run it to make sure I didn’t accidentally change a file. I have a habit of leaving a file open, walking away and coming back and adjusting the spacing. Probably not something I need to in a commit.

git status

This is really cool command, not only does it show you what is in staging it tells you what to do with the other files to either add/remove etc to get the commit in the shape you want. After working with git more, i went back and re-watched the peepcode screencast on git. I understand it better now!

After we committed, we realized we made a mistake in log message, so we did

git commit --amend

It will amend the last message in your git repo. I recently tried this with one of my commits, but I had already pushed to origin. I was kind of confused, so I asked aimee, she said

no If you have already pushed, you can git push –force to update, but be careful because it destroys references, so if there’s a chance someone else may have pulled the commit in the meantime you won’t want to go pulling the rug from under their feet, y’know! ;)

Ahh, makes sense aimee!!

Another sticky point for me was — what is inverse of git add? git rm?I keep a git repo of code I am working on as I to learn stuff, practice etc. Most if it is probably not really worth browsing, but i like to point my friends there when I talk about what I am doing. I wanted to clean up some stuff that I don’t want to keep and mistakenly thought if I git rm it would remove it from the staging. Nope, it removes it! Well, to revert a file back to what you use this:

git checkout — file.txt

more on this Why is “git rm” not the inverse of “git add”?

Anyways, a few tidbits of information I’ve learned recently, hope this can help you git better at git :)

sources I found helpful