Popular:
 Building Resilient Systems on AWS: Learn how to design and implement a resilient, highly available, fault-tolerant infrastructure on AWS.

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!

Request Metrics real user monitoring
Request Metrics real user monitoring
Request Metrics real user monitoring
Request Metrics real user monitoring

Recent Features

  • By
    Vibration API

    Many of the new APIs provided to us by browser vendors are more targeted toward the mobile user than the desktop user.  One of those simple APIs the Vibration API.  The Vibration API allows developers to direct the device, using JavaScript, to vibrate in...

  • By
    An Interview with Eric Meyer

    Your early CSS books were instrumental in pushing my love for front end technologies. What was it about CSS that you fell in love with and drove you to write about it? At first blush, it was the simplicity of it as compared to the table-and-spacer...

Incredible Demos

Discussion

  1. Justin Noel

    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!