From: Michal Suchánek <msuchanek@suse.de>
Date: Fri, 03 Jul 2026 12:17:45 GMT
Subject: Re: Programmatically edit the git rebase sequence?
Message-ID: <akeoaWAkrENbpi1G@kunlun.suse.cz>
In-Reply-To: <akei64goQf3nFhX4@hikari>

On Fri, Jul 03, 2026 at 02:02:33PM +0200, Matthias Beyer wrote:
> Hi git people,
> 
> in a recent conversation at work, the question of how to
> programmatically edit the git-rebase sequence came up.
> 
> Example use case:
> 
> I have a branch that touches a number of files, adds some files and
> removes some files.
> When rebasing, I want to split all commits that touched a certain subset
> of files, for the clearity of the history.
> 
> I look at the output of
> 
>     git log master..mybranch --oneline --diff-filter=M -- "./subdir/*.rs"
> 
> to find all commits in that subdir that only touched the files. All of
> these commits are to be "edit"ed.
> 
> Now I fire up `git rebase -i master` and manually(!) match the list from
> above `git-log` call and find the respective commits to edit them.
> 
> Is there a way I am not aware of to do that manual step programatically?
> Something like
> 
>     git rebase -i master --edit-commits="$(git log master..mybranch --diff-filter=M --format="%H" -- "./subdir/*.rs")"
> 
> would be convenient here, although I would understand if that is too
> much clutter for the already very heavy git CLI interface :-)
> 
> Maybe I am just not aware of the obvious solution - I would be happy to
> learn that there is already one!

Hello,

you could probably set a script as EDITOR (environment variable). Not
great for one-off scripts I guess.

Thanks

Michal