Modern Git Commands and Features You Should Be Using | Martin Heinz | Personal Website & Blog
martinheinz.dev

All of us - software engineers - use git every day, however most people only ever touch the most basic of commands, such as...

  • @[email protected]
    13•1 month ago
    Git bisect

    Is goddamn amazing! I had a very large multi-branch project that somewhere somehow had some crashing bug. Instead of searching through 5 or so branches with 20 something large commits for each, I bisected like 7 times and it told me exactly where to bug was introduced.

    Highly recommended

    • @lysdexicOPEnglish
      8•1 month ago

      Highly recommended

      I agree. Once we get a hang of the value that bisect brings, one unintended consequence is that we start to value atomic commits a whole lot more. There is nothing more annoying than bisecting a bug and suddenly stumbling upon a commit that does it all: updates dependencies, touches everything under the sun, does cleanup commits for unrelated files, etc. Yuck.

      • @[email protected]
        2•1 month ago

        Exactly! My case was such a case actually. But it further shows that bisect is a great tool that benefits from good practice.

    • @[email protected]
      5•1 month ago

      I love git bisect for complex regressions! If I don’t immediately know where a bug is, I write a regression test and then bisect to find where it was introduced. Knowing exactly where the bug was introduced and being able to look at the diff almost always speeds up finding the bug.

      • @robinm
        5•1 month ago

        For those who don’t know (I assume you do), you can git bisect run some_command and git will automatically run git bisect until it finds the falty commit. It’s amazing.

    • @robinm
      2•1 month ago

      It’s so anoying that at $WORK we have multiple git repos with symbolic link that points above their respective .git to each other and need to be in sync. So of course git workree and git bisect don’t work that well…

  • @tinker_james
    1•1 month ago

    I just took a stab at git worktree at work this week after rereading this article. It’s amazing. We were in the process of upgrading our UI component library and I was able to checkout pre/post upgrade branches without having to continuously npm install to swap between dependencies.

    Plus I’m pretty sure I could have both “versions” of our repo locally running at the same time so I could do UI comparisons…but I didn’t actually get that far.