I have a type of love-hate relationship with git. While I love the idea of version control, I often find myself in a situation where I have to clean up my git history. Maybe I have committed a file that I shouldn’t have, or I have made a mistake in my commit message, or I went down a path that just didn’t work out. In these cases, I find myself using git clean or git checkout quite a bit. In the worst case, I’ll even do a git reset --hard to go back to a previous commit. What all these do, is enable me to go back in time and start over. reset will let you go back in time even after committing, and deciding that the commit is not what you wanted. The other two help more if you haven’t committed yet, but have made changes that you want to get rid of.

I have found that the more I use these commands, the more I get used to them. But that doesn’t mean that I actually do them correctly. I have had my fair share of mistakes, where I have lost work that I didn’t want to lose. I had one when preparing my previous post!

I was working on the {neuromat} package, and I had made some changes to the code that just wasn’t what i was after. I decided I wanted to ditch the changes, and go back to what I had before.

git clean -f

git clean -f removes any untracked files, poof, gone are they. And one of the main things I had done was rename and create new files and re-arrange my code. So, that quickly deleted all of that work. Which I kind of wanted, it just went further back in time than I expected.

To my horror… I had forgotten to commit the changes I wanted to keep. The majority of the good things I had done, went away with the stuff I didn’t like. I felt… defeated.

I had to start over, and redo the work I had done. Maëlle Salmon to the rescue! I had a chat with her, mostly ranting about how stupid I was, and she suggested I could try to just “undo” in any of my open documents. In this instance, I was using RStudio IDE, which is my go-to IDE for R work, especially R package dev work (lookout for a future post on my IDE preferences). “Undo” here meant hitting ctrl+ z. In my fury over my git mistakes, I forgot that such a simple solution could exist!

Presto, I could just “undo” myself back to the state I wanted to be in. Ok, so I did lose some things that I had done, but they were rather small and easy to fix.

Both for the mistake, and not thinking of the fairly simple solution.

Thankfully, other more experienced and advanced developers than me also make such mistakes.

It’s always nice to know that you’re not alone in your mistakes.

And trust that the awesome Julia Evans of course has a zine for this! And if she has a zine for it, I know I’m in good company.

And if you, like me (and so many others), need help on your git journey, Maëlle also has an amazing R package to help you practice! Read her Instroduction to {saperlipopette} to get started!