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undo_commit_but_preserve_changes.md

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git reset, with soft: Undo your last commit but keep your changes

Use case

I needed to make some changes in branch-a to satisfy some PR comments, but I had some messy, in-progress work on branch-b. branch-b wasn't working, I've changed a lot of files, I'm kind of midstream. But I'm about to go into a meeting so I'm losing focus anyway. I want to preserve my changes, so I just commit them all with the comment "🚧".

I attend my meeting, checkout branch-a and make my changes.

Back from the meeting, the PR changes, and lunch, I can't remember exactly what I was doing. I rebuild and my memory is jogged... oh yeah, weird error and I don't know why. I am no closer to discovering why it's happening. Worse, because I committed my changes, I can't even see a diff of my changes unless I push them, which I don't want to do because I hate rebasing and I know that, once I untangle myself from the mess I made, I will want to make a few neat, explanatory commits and not one big spaghetti one.

So I want to undo my last commit, the "🚧" one, but keep all the changes. I also want to ONLY undo my last commit, because I know I had a few others before that on this branch.

Links

What to do

git reset HEAD~1 --soft

This reverts the commit, but retains the changes. They are also still staged for commit. This is what I see when I run git status:

        modified:   docs/index.md
        modified:   mkdocs.yml
        modified:   path/to/other/file/I/modified.md

Now I can see where I was and start figuring my way out of the bug I was chasing.