Git Commands You Should Know by Heart

The everyday loop

Ninety percent of Git work is five commands: status to see where you are, add to stage, commit to record, pull --rebase to sync, and push to publish. The other ten percent — the part this guide covers — is recovering from mistakes and understanding what's actually staged.

Staging precisely

• git add -p — stage hunks interactively; split one file's changes into multiple commits
• git restore --staged file — unstage without touching the working tree
• git restore file — discard uncommitted changes in one file (destructive)
• git stash -u — stash including untracked files; git stash pop to restore

Undoing safely

The key question before any undo: have you pushed? If yes, prefer git revert <sha> — it creates a new commit that inverses the old one, keeping history honest for everyone. If the mistake is still local, you can rewrite:

• git commit --amend — fix the last commit's message or contents
• git reset --soft HEAD~1 — undo last commit, keep changes staged
• git reset --hard HEAD~1 — undo last commit and delete the changes
• git reflog — every HEAD movement for 90 days; the way back from "disasters"

Branching and inspection

• git switch -c feature/x — create and switch (the modern checkout -b)
• git log --oneline --graph --all — the shape of history
• git diff main...HEAD — your branch vs where it forked
• git blame -L 20,30 file — who last touched those lines and in which commit
• git bisect start — binary-search history for the commit that introduced a bug

Two habits worth building

Commit messages in the imperative: "add retry loop", not "added retry loop" — the convention that makes git rebase auto-squash messages read correctly. Never rewrite public history: push --force on a shared branch destroys teammates' work; if you must, use --force-with-lease, which refuses when someone pushed before you.

Keep the full searchable reference open in the Git Cheat Sheet — it runs entirely in your browser.