Oh Shit, Git?

I'm not proud of it, but my #1 "Oh shit" git operation is to just delete my local repo, reclone, and reapply the changes. Works really well for me 95% of the time. The rest I ask dev ops guy to help.

This should be a built-in

  git unshit

Or

  git add --unshit -f ~HEAD^^

If you’re using git version <= 2.844.

I've been using Git for almost 15 years, and have twice built programs/products that use Git internally to achieve certain results (that is, the program/product itself uses Git for things, not just using Git to manage the source code for the program/product) and... sometimes before doing something a little gnarly in Git I'll still just do "cp -R .git ../git-backup" or something like that, so I can replace my entire .git dir with an older copy if I screw it up too bad. It's a ton faster than figuring out the right way to un-fuck any particular operation or set of operations.

Reflog is your friend.

    git break-my-shit
    git reflog
        ... output saying where you were before things broke
        ... grab the good commit sha
    git reset --hard good_commit_sha_from_reflog

Jujutsu has `jj undo`, but which undoes whatever was your last jj command, regardless of what it was. It makes much more confident to do an operation I'm uncertain of. And if I regret something many actions down the line, you have `jj op log` (a better reflog).

And yet up above we have others recommending to never, ever, use `git reset --hard ...`.

The same people probably want to ban knives!

If you `jj undo` a second time, does it redo (undoing the undo), or does it back up another step?

You're not alone. https://xkcd.com/1597/

Such a simple operation, but it'd probably fix 95% of problems I've had with git.

"Uh oh, I tried to checkout a branch from remote by doing `git checkout origin/some-branch` instead of `git checkout some-branch` and made a couple source changes. Now I'm in detached head state. What is detached head ? I have to stash my revisions? Can I make a new branch with the same name or do I need to delete the origin/some-branch that I'm on?"

When you could be able to just revert the "operation" and check out the correct branch, that's amazing.

It redos, there's discussion about if and how this should change: https://github.com/jj-vcs/jj/issues/3700

The copy-the-.git-dir trick works for worse issues than can be solved with a single reset --hard. Damn near anything, really, as long as you haven't touched any remotes. It also works if you don't remember/understand how you broke it, where it's broken, or which state you need to try to reset to.

For background, this is because the `undo` itself is an operation pushed onto the top of the stack. It is a little counterintuitive.