Editing history safely

In this chapterChoose the right way to edit or recover commit history.

Everything here can be undone with Undo. GitTrail warns before rewriting commits that are already pushed or already in main.

• History editor (interactive rebase): drag commits to reorder; squash, fixup, reword, drop or split them. No text editor needed.
• Squash by dropping one commit on another.
• Fixup commits: make fixup! commits, then squash them all.
• Move files or hunks out of a commit.
• Cherry-pick onto several branches in one go.
• Reset: soft, mixed, hard, or keep (your uncommitted work stays).
• Revert one or several commits.
• Reflog: see every move of HEAD and branches; recover lost commits.
• Bisect: find the commit that broke something, step by step, or let a test command decide.
• Clean up history: find the biggest files in history and remove files or secrets from every commit, with a backup.