Common Git Problems and How to Fix Them
I think the most powerful tool for fixing mistakes is "git reflog". It doesn't fix everything, but it works very well as long as you view git with the right mental model: a git repo is an ever-growing tree of immutable commits, with branches and tags pointing to the most interesting ones. As long as code has ever made it into that tree (by being in any commit at any time), it's recoverable, and reflog lets you trace your steps back to any point in the past on that tree. Supposedly-destructive operations like amend and rebase actually just build the tree at a different point and move branches to other places in the tree, but (pretty much) nothing in the tree is ever destroyed.<p>For the actually-destructive git commands like checkout and reset, another tool that I'd highly recommend is a "local history" feature in your editor. JetBrains IDEs do this by default, and other editors have plugins for it. It automatically records changes as you make them so you can go back to previous versions of any file. Usually git is enough to save me, but I've also had plenty of times where I make some mistake outside of git commit history and am saved by digging through local history.