Lessons · Git · soft, mixed and hard

Soft, mixed and hard

Three depths in order. Soft moves the branch. Mixed moves the branch and the index. Hard moves those and your files.

Hone is a place to practise programming. This is one of its lessons, written out in full and free to read without an account.

What it is for

Learning them as a sequence rather than three unrelated flags is what makes reset predictable instead of frightening.

How to think about it

Say what should happen to the changes before you type the flag, then pick the depth that matches. Only the deepest one can lose work.

Worked example

git reset --soft HEAD~1

Depth one: the branch only.

git status --short

Staged. The index still holds what the commit held.

git reset HEAD~0

Mixed is the default, and here it unstages.

git status --short

The same change, one column to the right.

git add f.txt

Put it back.

git commit -qm two

And recommit, so the next line has something to undo.

git reset --hard HEAD~1

Depth three. The file on disk goes back too.

cat f.txt

one. Whatever was in the working tree is gone.

Your turn

Move the branch back one and discard the changes entirely.

git reset  HEAD~1

The trap

Using --hard because it is the one you remember. Soft and mixed cannot lose an edit; hard is the only one that overwrites files.

Practise soft, mixed and hard on HoneA question on it now, a coding challenge where there is one, and it is remembered for review. Free, no email needed.