Git Rebase Interactive

What I Learned

Git’s interactive rebase (git rebase -i) is a powerful tool for cleaning up commit history before pushing changes. It allows you to reorder, squash, edit, or remove commits.

Details

Interactive rebase opens an editor with a list of commits and commands:

1git rebase -i HEAD~3

Available commands:

  • pick - use commit as-is
  • reword - change commit message
  • edit - stop for amending
  • squash - combine with previous commit
  • fixup - like squash but discard commit message
  • drop - remove commit

Example workflow:

pick abc1234 Add feature X
squash def5678 Fix typo in feature X
reword ghi9012 Update documentation

This creates a cleaner history by combining related commits and improving commit messages.

References

git version-control productivity