Git: How to edit/reword a merge commit’s message

commitgitgit-amend

How do I edit or reword a merge commit's message?

git commit --amend works if it's the last commit made (HEAD), but what if it comes before HEAD?

git rebase -i HEAD~5 doesn't list the merge commits.

Best Answer

If you add the --preserve-merges option (or its synonym, -p) to the git rebase -i command then git will try to preserve the merges when rebasing, rather than linearizing the history, and you should be able to amend the merge commits as well:

git rebase -i -p HEAD~5

Note. --perserve-merges has been deprecated in favour of --rebase-merges as of git v2.22 (https://www.infoq.com/news/2019/07/git-2-22-rebase-merges/).

Related Solutions

Git – Undoing a git rebase

The easiest way would be to find the head commit of the branch as it was immediately before the rebase started in the reflog...

git reflog

and to reset the current branch to it (with the usual caveats about being absolutely sure before reseting with the --hard option).

Suppose the old commit was HEAD@{2} in the ref log:

git reset --hard HEAD@{2}

In Windows, you may need to quote the reference:

git reset --hard "HEAD@{2}"

You can check the history of the candidate old head by just doing a git log HEAD@{2} (Windows: git log "HEAD@{2}").

If you've not disabled per branch reflogs you should be able to simply do git reflog branchname@{1} as a rebase detaches the branch head before reattaching to the final head. I would double check this, though as I haven't verified this recently.

Per default, all reflogs are activated for non-bare repositories:

[core]
    logAllRefUpdates = true

Git – How to undo ‘git add’ before commit

You can undo git add before commit with

git reset <file>

which will remove it from the current index (the "about to be committed" list) without changing anything else.

You can use

git reset

without any file name to unstage all due changes. This can come in handy when there are too many files to be listed one by one in a reasonable amount of time.

In old versions of Git, the above commands are equivalent to git reset HEAD <file> and git reset HEAD respectively, and will fail if HEAD is undefined (because you haven't yet made any commits in your repository) or ambiguous (because you created a branch called HEAD, which is a stupid thing that you shouldn't do). This was changed in Git 1.8.2, though, so in modern versions of Git you can use the commands above even prior to making your first commit:

"git reset" (without options or parameters) used to error out when you do not have any commits in your history, but it now gives you an empty index (to match non-existent commit you are not even on).

Documentation: git reset

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Git – Undoing a git rebase

Git – How to undo ‘git add’ before commit

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