Undo File Changes with Git

By  on  

One of my favorite features in modern text editors is their ability to integrate tools to format code upon every save.  When you're working on legacy projects, however, auto-formatting can be a problem; if you open a file that you don't explicitly change, the file may still get modified by the formatter.  This all leads to git status showing a bunch of file modifications that you don't want.

To quickly undo file changes with git, execute the following two commands:

git reset HEAD path/to/file.ext
git checkout path/to/file.ext

The second command (checkout) is required or you'll still see the file listed when running git status again.  With both of those executions, you'll no longer see the file listed with git status.

git makes version control easy but the two steps needed to essentially revert changes to a file aren't intuitive, thus I thought I would share on this blog.  Happy coding!

Recent Features

  • By
    Facebook Open Graph META Tags

    It's no secret that Facebook has become a major traffic driver for all types of websites.  Nowadays even large corporations steer consumers toward their Facebook pages instead of the corporate websites directly.  And of course there are Facebook "Like" and "Recommend" widgets on every website.  One...

  • By
    CSS @supports

    Feature detection via JavaScript is a client side best practice and for all the right reasons, but unfortunately that same functionality hasn't been available within CSS.  What we end up doing is repeating the same properties multiple times with each browser prefix.  Yuck.  Another thing we...

Incredible Demos

  • By
    Web Audio API

    The Web Audio API allows developers to load and decode audio on demand using JavaScript.  The more I evaluate awesome games for Firefox OS TVs, the more I get to learn about these APIs that I normally wouldn't touch.  The following is a very basic introduction to the WebAudio API...

  • By
    Create Spinning Rays with CSS3 Animations & JavaScript

    Thomas Fuchs, creator of script2 (scriptaculous' second iteration) and Zepto.js (mobile JavaScript framework), creates outstanding animated elements with JavaScript.  He's a legend in his own right, and for good reason:  his work has helped to inspire developers everywhere to drop Flash and opt...

Discussion

  1. I’m pretty sure you don’t need the

    git reset HEAD path/to/file.ext

    .

    I’ve always just used

    git checkout path/to/file.ext

Wrap your code in <pre class="{language}"></pre> tags, link to a GitHub gist, JSFiddle fiddle, or CodePen pen to embed!