git-fast-reword

Fast alternative for changing commit messages.

Motivation

Given a big git repository and some commit C, let's say something like HEAD~1000. You want to change commit message of C. So, what you can do is:

git rebase -i HEAD~1000

The problem is, that git rebase is extremely slow if you want apply it to 1000 commits. So, instead you can use

git-fast-reword HEAD~1000 "You new message"

to solve the problem.

Build

You will need C and C++ compilers able to compile C99 and C++17 code. You will also need cmake and libssl (on ubuntu: apt install cmake libssl-dev).

git clone https://github.com/FirstTimeInForever/git-fast-reword.git --recursive
cd git-fast-reword
mkdir build && cd build
cmake -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release ../ && make all -j8

How it works

This tool will find target commit specified by <revision>, find all commits in range [<revision>; HEAD], reword the target commit and recreate the chain of child commits from the range. After that it sets current HEAD to recreated commit.

Usage

git-rebase-reword <revision> <message> [--verbose]