git-autofixup VS git-absorb

Somewhat (or possibly greatly) related:

Are tools like git-absorb safe/reliable?

"Essentially, when your working directory has uncommitted changes on top of draft changesets, you can run `hg absorb` and the uncommitted modifications are automagically folded ("absorbed") into the appropriate draft ancestor changesets. This is essentially doing `hg histedit` + "roll" actions without having to make a commit or manually make history modification rules."

I haven't wrapped my head around the algorithm. I get that an algorithm can "recollate" a series of commits in a way that yields no commit conflicts, but that's not the same as rearranging and combining commits into a sequence of semantically coherent atomic commits.

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https://github.com/tummychow/git-absorb

https://github.com/torbiak/git-autofixup

git-autofixup can also be installed by simply downloading the script[1], giving it execute permissions, and putting it somewhere in your PATH. It needs perl 5.8.4+, which is very old, and only depends on the standard library. Git ships with a Perl interpreter on Windows.

If there are any staged changes, git-autofixup only fixes those up and ignores any unstaged ones; otherwise it tries to autofixup all unstaged changes.

[1]: https://github.com/torbiak/git-autofixup/blob/master/git-aut...

Nice, no need to look up past commits ! Didn't know about this, I had to look it up.

It's a separate project from git [0].

[0]: https://github.com/tummychow/git-absorb

Boy have I got the thing for you. git absorb - https://github.com/tummychow/git-absorb

The way to work with it is:

    git add file1

You can also manage via a holistic UI: - Bisection - Log and reflog, stashes - subtrees, submodules - certain third party subcommands like git-absorb, and extend it with your own - interact with issues and pull requests via forge - pretty much all of the hundreds of CLI flags via a modal UI that got generalized and extracted to a lib called transient - well-integrated diff and conflict resolution (which is mostly just smerge) - the rebase/cherry-pick workflows I liked the best, including support for --update-refs - at any time you can always press a key to see the raw commands and output that it's using, which taught me a ton of corner cases - IMO it has a great manual

I sometimes use git-absorb to help me if I made a tonne of changes, and can't be arsed to manually make the fixups

If done well, your git history carries the information of your process in a very similar way.

You have to be somewhere in the middle, so I'd say to do a semantic rebase at last step before merge. A fantastic tool that is not so well-known is git-absorb, which helps a lot doing that cleanly and automatically.

https://github.com/tummychow/git-absorb

Squash merge is like a sledge hammer, interactive rebase + git reset -N HEAD^ + git-absorb + git add -p (or even better, Magit) are surgical tools.