10 Git Commands You’ll Wish You Knew Earlier

Do you know Git? Of course you do! Today, I've compiled a list of my favorite intermediate-level Git commands that I wish I'd discovered sooner in my career. These tips come from a tech lead who taught me most of them and later shared them with junior and mid-level developers. I've been meaning to write this article for months, but finally got motivated after seeing a similar post by @francistrdev.

If you're new to Git, check out Francis's Git Gud! article first. However, if you're already comfortable with basic commands like add, commit, pull, and push, this article is for you. Let's dive into the commands!

1. git merge vs git rebase

These two commands are often confused with each other, but they have distinct purposes and outcomes. Both are used to integrate histories from one branch into another, typically updating a feature branch with changes from a main or develop branch.

Merge: When you run git merge main while on the feature branch, Git combines both histories, creating a merge commit (M) that preserves the original history. While this approach maintains the real history, it can result in a tangled, "spaghetti-like" history if merged frequently.

Rebase: Instead, running git rebase main moves your commits (D and E) onto the latest main branch and reapplies them on top, resulting in a cleaner, linear history. However, this creates new commits with different hashes, effectively rewriting history. This should be done with caution, as rebasing shared history can confuse other developers working on the same branch.

Conflicts can arise during both merge and rebase processes, but rebase can be more annoying since Git reapplies commits one by one, potentially causing multiple conflicts. If things go wrong, you can abort the operation using git merge --abort or git rebase --abort.