Git — Advanced Operations

A rebase mode that opens an editor to let you reorder, combine, edit, or drop commits. Used to clean up commit history before merging a feature branch.

"Before merging, run git rebase -i HEAD~5 to squash the five WIP commits into one clean commit with a descriptive message."

A rebase pick option that combines a commit with the previous commit, merging their changes into one.

"Mark all the fixup commits as squash in the interactive rebase — the resulting single commit will include all changes and let you write one clear message."

Apply the changes from a specific commit onto the current branch, without merging the entire branch.

"We cherry-picked the hotfix commit from the release branch onto main to get the fix into production without merging unfinished features."

A log of everywhere HEAD has pointed, including commits that are no longer referenced. Used to recover lost commits or undo accidental resets.

"After the accidental reset, I used git reflog to find the commit SHA and ran git checkout to recover the lost work."

A binary search tool for finding the commit that introduced a bug. You mark commits as good or bad and Git narrows down to the culprit.

"git bisect identified the regression in 7 steps across 200 commits — we marked HEAD as bad and the last release as good, then bisect found the exact commit that broke the sorting algorithm."

Temporarily shelve uncommitted changes so you can switch branches or tasks, then restore them later with git stash pop or git stash apply.

"I stashed my in-progress changes with git stash push -m "auth refactor WIP", switched to fix an urgent bug, then restored with git stash pop."

A linked working directory from one repository that allows you to have multiple branches checked out simultaneously in different directories.

"Using git worktree add ../hotfix-1.8 release-1.8 let me work on the hotfix in a separate directory without stashing my main feature branch work."

Reuse Recorded Resolution — Git remembers how you resolved a merge conflict and automatically applies the same resolution next time.

"With rerere enabled, rebasing the long-running feature branch onto main was quick — Git automatically resolved the recurring i18n conflicts using the saved resolution."

A cherry-pick flag that applies the commit's changes to the working tree and index but does not create a commit, allowing further edits before committing.

"I cherry-picked the migration script with --no-commit to modify the target table name before committing the adjusted version."

A Git feature that allows checking out only a subset of the files in a repository, useful for large monorepos where you only need specific directories.

"In the 40 GB monorepo, sparse checkout with cone mode lets frontend developers only check out the packages/ui/ directory, reducing clone time from 18 minutes to 2 minutes."