It is no secret that i’m a fan of interactive git rebase. It gives me the power to clean up the numerous small intermediate commits that i did so frequently while in the course of completing a feature (or bugfix). In the process, i usually do quite abit of squashing, reshuffling & rewording, such that the eventual commits i push upstream are well-organized & each commit is meaningful to the rest of the team.

Usually i use pick & squash to achieve the compressing of different commits. Recently, my coworker showed me an alternative, which uses reword & fixup. Here’s how it can be done:

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$ git rebase -i <branch>

Instead of doing:

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pick 6354612 WIP ~ monkey patched to fix bug#234.
squash 4de4f66 WIP ~ conform to recommended way of patching.
squash 3545b15 WIP ~ fixed incomplete removal of hackish patch.
squash 7000cfe WIP ~ removed the no-longer-needed :rightnow tag.

Do this:

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reword 6354612 WIP ~ monkey patched to fix bug#234.
fixup 4de4f66 WIP ~ conform to recommended way of patching.
fixup 3545b15 WIP ~ fixed incomplete removal of hackish patch.
fixup 7000cfe WIP ~ removed the no-longer-needed :rightnow tag.

Of course, the 2 approaches are different:

• reword & fixup, u get to either keep the 1st commit message, or rephrase it
• pick & squash, u have more choices ~ from keeping all of the various commit messages, to writing a brand new message

For me, i almost always want the effect of reword & fixup.