git instafix

Quickly fix up an old commit using your currently-staged changes.

Usage

After installation, just run git instafix to commit your currently-staged changes to an older commit in your branch.

By default, git instafix checks for staged changes and offers to amend an old commit.

Given a repo that looks like:

Running git instafix will allow you to edit an old commit:

The default behavior will check if your current HEAD commit has an upstream branch and show you only the commits between where you currently are and that commit. If there is no upstream for HEAD you will see the behavior above.

If you're using a pull-request workflow (e.g. github) you will often have repos that look more like this:

You can set GIT_INSTAFIX_UPSTREAM to a branch name and git instafix will only show changes between HEAD and the merge-base:

In general this is just what you want, since you probably shouldn't be editing commits that other people are working off of.

After you select the commit to edit, git instafix will apply your staged changes to that commit without any further prompting or work from you.

Adding the --squash flag will behave the same, but after you have selected the commit amend to git will give you a chance to edit the commit message before changing the tree at that point.

Installation

You can install the latest version with curl:

curl --proto '=https' --tlsv1.2 -LsSf https://github.com/quodlibetor/git-instafix/releases/latest/download/git-instafix-installer.sh | sh

If you have Homebrew (including linuxbrew) you can install it with:

brew install quodlibetor/git-tools/git-instafix

You can also install from this repo with cargo:

cargo install --git https://github.com/quodlibetor/git-instafix

Otherwise, you will need to compile with Rust. Install rust, clone this repo, build, and then copy the binary into your bin dir:

curl https://sh.rustup.rs -sSf | sh
git clone https://github.com/quodlibetor/git-instafix && cd git-instafix
cargo build --release
cp target/release/git-instafix /usr/local/bin/git-instafix

Similar or related projects

• git-absorb is a fantastic tool that will automatically determine which commits to amend. It is reliable, the main downside to it is that it relies on a diff intersection between your changes and ancestor commits, and so sometimes cannot determine which commits to amend.
• git-fixup is more-or less a pure-shell version of this same tool. We have some different features. The big differences between git-fixup and git-instafix are pretty much all surface level, and git-instafix is written in Rust which allows for some slightly fancier interactions. git-instafix does not depend on the system it's being run on having a git binary, instead using libgit2 for all git interactions.

License

git-instafix is licensed under either of

• Apache License, Version 2.0, (LICENSE-APACHE or http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0)
• MIT license (LICENSE-MIT or http://opensource.org/licenses/MIT)

at your option.

Patches and bug reports welcome!