# refactoring a branch with e.g. meld how?

1 messages from 2016-08-04 to 2016-08-04. Participants: Britton Kerin.
Thread: https://gitlist.dev/t/43002

## Britton Kerin, 2016-08-04 01:09

Subject: refactoring a branch with e.g. meld how?
Message-ID: <CAC4O8c9uogrxVX-rqkdt9mL+afOsvSs5=aZCzuPmfB-z-m_3sg@mail.gmail.com>
URL: https://gitlist.dev/e/CAC4O8c9uogrxVX-rqkdt9mL%2BafOsvSs5%3DaZCzuPmfB-z-m_3sg%40mail.gmail.com

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I've been asked to seriously reorganize and compress a big branch (75 commits)

What I'd like to do is make branches foo_flattened with all commits
and branch foo_reorganized
starting at the ancestor, then work by incrementally doing
meld/commit/meld/commit/etc from foo_flattened into foo_reorganized.

I hoped to use git difftool -d foo_flattened foo_reorganized, taking
advantage of the symlink behavior on the right hand side, but it links
the individual files not the entire working tree, which isn't too
useful since a lot of the changes introduce files.

Is there a git command to help with this or should I just be making a
copy of the entire foo_flattened tree and work from that?

I recall running across some command that I think was supposed to let
you have coexisting working trees of multiple commits or something,
but I can't find it now.

Britton

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