Fixing Mistakes

The most common reaction to making a mistake in Git is to panic. What if you have just lost all your work? Worse, what if you have broken the master branch?

This chapter will review a number of common Git mistakes and how to fix them. The first rule, of course, is stay calm, or as Douglas Adams said, Don't Panic!

The problems we'll review are:

• You wrote the wrong message in a commit.
• You forgot to add changed files from your last commit.
• Problems with the order of commits or their messages.
• You need to undo changes made in a commit.
• You misnamed your branch.
• You committed to the wrong branch.
• You trashed a file in a previous commit.
• You messed up the remote by pushing a broken branch.

To see the answers at work, let's mirror Panofy into ErrorsDemo. Here are the steps we'll be doing:

1. On the remote, create ErrorsDemo and get its URL.
2. Go to the local branch you want...