Re: [PATCH v5 0/4] history: add squash subcommand to fold a range

From: Matt Hunter <m@lfurio.us>
Date: Jun 30, 2026, 09:23 UTC
Message-ID: <DJM9WBO3EI9M.5ASUW8SQ6BP2@lfurio.us>
In-Reply-To: <CAHwyqnVBEOm+FwD+i9Aa7edTvdnDPJom1zubcXgoExZnp--vWQ@mail.gmail.com>

On Tue Jun 30, 2026 at 3:19 AM EDT, Harald Nordgren wrote:

Show 14 quoted lines

>> This is probably a larger question, since (according to the man page) it
>> affects the other 'git history' commands as well.  When I run
>> 'git history ...' and discover that I made a mistake after inspecting
>> the results, is there a fool-proof way to undo the change and return to
>> the previous state?  My first thought was to run 'git reset --hard ...',
>> but the default behavior of --update-refs (moving other branches) can
>> make this more complicated.
>
> This is a larger question: But I would love to have a reflog that is
> more human-centered. When e.g. rebasing a series with N commits, it's
> very tricky in the reflog to find what was the state before that.
>
> I feel like branch switching is given too much space in the reflog,
> since it's not a destructive action, I don't care about it.

I share these headaches to an extent. When dealing with the first problem (seeing an atomic entry in the reflog), I usually look at the branch's own reflog instead of HEAD's

But my question is about doing a comprehensive reset from a botched operation. If any history operation updates branch refs besides the current one. I don't think there's an obvious way to see which other ones were affected, and a naive 'git reset --hard my-branch@{1}' leaves them pointed at unwanted commits. Is this right?

tangent: I'm pretty sure that git-status relies on checkout / branch switching reflog entries in order to know which tag your detached HEAD started from, eg: when it says something like

    HEAD detached from v2.55.0-rc2
    nothing to commit, working tree clean

>
> And when handling multiple commits in on go (squashing, rebasing), I
> would love to see a visual hierarchy (with indentation for sub-steps)
> instead of treating each action as equally important when it isn't.

Sounds compelling!