Until last night I lived in fear of tildes, carats, resets and reverts in Git. I cargo culted, I destroyed, I laid waste the tidy indicies, branches and trees Git so diligently tried to maintain. Then Zach Holman gave a talk at Paperless Post. It was about Git secrets. He didn't directly cover these topics but he gave an example that made me realize it was time to learn.
A better undo
Generally, when I push out bad code, I panic, hit git reset --hard HEAD^
, push and clean up the pieces later. I don't even really know what most of that means. Notational Velocity seems to be fond of it ... in that I just keep copying it from Notational Velocity and pasting it. Turns out, this is dumb. I've irreversibly lost the faulty changes I made. I'll probably even make the same mistakes again. It's like torching your house to get rid of some mice.
Enter Holman. He suggests a better default undo. git reset --soft HEAD^
. Says it stag