Git revert is overwriting my files

Question

Say I make a bunch of changes to my files locally, then add these changes to the staging index and then commit them. Then I realise that actually, I've made some mistakes, and I want to quickly undo that whole commit and get back to where I was right before I committed (ie with my changes out of the repo and back in the index).

I tried to do a git revert SHA and this did indeed undo my most recent commit, but it also completely overwrote all my files and put them back into their original state.

How do I revert a commit without it overwriting my changes?

Answer 1

You're looking for git reset --soft <last commit you want to keep>.

Note however that unlike revert, this will undo all of the commits after the one you specify (e.g. if you have A-B-C-D (HEAD) and you git reset --soft B, both C and D will be undone, with both of their changes left in the index).

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Of course, another option is to not undo your last commit, but instead just modify it to get rid of the mistakes. You can do this via git commit --amend, which acts just like git commit except that instead of creating a new commit, it modifies (amends) the latest existing commit.

git commit -m "this commit has mistake(s)"
...edit the file(s) with mistake(s)...
git add <file>
git commit --amend -m "same commit, no mistake(s)"