Git Cheat Sheet

Frequently asked questions

What's the difference between reset, revert and restore?

restore touches files (discard working changes), reset moves the branch pointer (undo local commits), revert makes a new commit that undoes an old one (safe on shared branches). Rule of thumb: pushed already? Use revert.

Merge or rebase?

Merge preserves history exactly as it happened; rebase rewrites your commits onto the latest base for a linear history. Both are fine — the one hard rule is never rebase commits that others have already pulled.

How do I get out of a broken state?

git status almost always tells you the next step. If mid-merge or mid-rebase, git merge --abort / git rebase --abort return you to safety. And git reflog can recover "lost" commits for about 90 days — in Git, very little is truly gone.