King & McGaw Developers

About a year or so ago, I started keeping notes of my most-used Git tricks. I still refer back to them as I am so terrible at remembering commands (particularly unintuitive ones like deleting remote branches), so I thought they might be useful for others too.

Keep git from tracking permission changes to files git config core.filemode false

Restore a branch to the remote version (i.e. if you have pulled an incorrect remote branch) git fetch git reset –hard origin/master

Restore a single file to a version on another branch git checkout branch_name path/to-file

Search for a string in the commit history: git show :/search_string

Amend the last commit message: git commit –amend -m “New commit message”

Toggle between branches git checkout -

colourise all git commands git config –global color.ui true

Use mergetool git mergetool -t opendiff

Delete a branch remotely git push origin :newfeature

Delete a branch locally git branch -d newfeature

Delete branches that don’t exist on remote git remote prune origin

This one is Github-specific: You can compare commit ranges by appending compare like so… compare/master…someotherbranch compare/master@{yesterday}…master compare/master@{2.days.ago}…master compare/master@{2012-05-01}…master