GoKawiilThe open-source Git project just released Git 2.54 with features and bug fixes from over 137 contributors, 66 of them new. We last caught up with you on the latest in Git back when 2.52 was released.
To celebrate this most recent release, here is GitHub’s look at some of the most interesting features and changes introduced since last time.
💡 Since the last Git release we wrote about was Git 2.52, this blog post covers the highlights from both the 2.53 and 2.54 releases.
Rewrite history with git history
The Git project has a long history of providing tools to rewrite your repository’s history. git rebase –i is the most well-known, and it’s remarkably flexible: you can reorder, squash, edit, and drop commits. But that flexibility comes with complexity: an interactive rebase operates on a range of commits, updates your working tree and index as it goes, and can leave you in a conflicted state that you need to resolve before proceeding.
For simpler cases, all of that machinery can feel like overkill. If all you want to do is fix a typo in a commit message three commits back, or split one commit into two, an interactive rebase works, but requires you to set up a to-do list, mark the right commit for editing, and then drive the rebase to completion.
Git 2.54 introduces a new experimental command that is designed for exactly these simpler cases: git history . The history command currently supports two operations: reword and split .
git history reword <commit> opens your editor with the specified commit’s message and rewrites it in place, updating any branches that descend from that commit. Unlike git rebase , it doesn’t touch your working tree or index, and it can even operate in a bare repository.
git history split <commit> lets you interactively split a commit into two by selecting which hunks should be carved out into a new parent commit. The interface will look familiar if you’ve ever used add in interactive mode via git add –p :
$ git history split HEAD diff --git a/bar b/bar new file mode 100644 index 0000000..50810a5 --- /dev/null +++ b/bar @@ -0,0 +1 @@ +bar (1/1) Stage addition [y,n,q,a,d,p,?]? y
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