git-edit

Small script to make editing commits faster

Installation

Download git-edit to a directory that is in your PATH environment variable. This will allow you to invoke it as if it was a built-in Git command (e.g. git edit -o).

Usage

usage: git-edit [-h] [-o] [-c] [<revision>]

Edit a commit in a Git repository

positional arguments:
  <revision>            the revision to edit

optional arguments:
  -h, --help            show this help message and exit
  -o, --commit-original
                        commit the current staged changes with the message of
                        the revision being edited
  -c, --continue        finish editing the commit

Examples

Suppose we have the following history in a Git repository:

A -- B -- C -- D
               ↑
              HEAD

and we want to split commit B into two commits, B1 and B2. We want B1 to have a single change: introduce a file named file1 that was previously added in B, and we want B2 to contain the rest of the changes reusing the message from B. git-edit makes it simple:

$ git edit B

This is the equivalent of doing:

# start rebasing from the parent of B
$ git rebase -i B^
# (edit the rebase TODO list so that the B hash is marked with "edit")
# undo B so we can edit it
$ git reset --soft HEAD

We can now commit B1:

$ git commit -m 'Adding file 1' -- file1

And create B2 with the same message from B and the rest of the staged changes:

$ git edit -o

This is the equivalent of doing:

$ git commit --reuse-message=B

(if we don't want to reuse the message, we can just manually commit the changes with another message, e.g. git commit -m 'Some other message')

Finally we can finish editing:

# this just cleans up a file used for store purposes and end the rebase process
$ git edit -c

The history now looks like this:

A -- B1 -- B2 -- C -- D
                      ↑
                     HEAD

B1 contains a part of the changes from B, while B2 contains the rest. B2 also has the same message as B.

TODO

• Linter up with pylint/pycodestyle
• Document functions
• Fix --reword: need to use a real tty otherwise git complains
• Handle merge commits or commits whose parent is a merge commit
• Support editing multiple commits
• Add an --abort switch
• Handle root commit
• Color git-status output (called just after edit has started)
• Print a short summary of the newly created commits (hashes and msg) or some message if they were all removed