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
    Create Namespaced Classes with MooTools

    MooTools has always gotten a bit of grief for not inherently using and standardizing namespaced-based JavaScript classes like the Dojo Toolkit does.  Many developers create their classes as globals which is generally frowned up.  I mostly disagree with that stance, but each to their own.  In any event...

Incredible Demos

  • By
    spellcheck Attribute

    Many useful attributes have been provided to web developers recently:  download, placeholder, autofocus, and more.  One helpful older attribute is the spellcheck attribute which allows developers to  control an elements ability to be spell checked or subject to grammar checks.  Simple enough, right?

  • By
    Google-Style Element Fading Using MooTools or jQuery

    Google recently introduced an interesting effect to their homepage: the top left and top right navigation items don't display until you move your mouse or leave the search term box. Why? I can only speculate that they want their homepage as...

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!