A couple ideas:

This thread is getting long (great, but long) — have you considered opening github issues for each of these sub-discussions? The “undo” discussion, for example. Somehow git issues tend to narrow down the scope of an issue and also help break issues into parts (separate issues) so that you can think about tackling each one narrowly.

Second, I was thinking about the vocab on “stage” – you know, i strongly suspect that if you look at each person’s git workflow, they would be pretty heterogenous; a friend always starts new coding sessions by branching, then tries to merge the branch back into his local master before pushing. I actually never use the term “stage” and don’t really know what you’re referring to. I could RTFM but “the stage” and “my stage” is already kind of confusing. Just something to think about when developing syntax.

# Show difference between the stage and my code
> git diff STAGE

# Difference between my stage and last commit
> git diff STAGE HEAD

Lastly, I agree with you that ‘git undo’ would be great. I think if there’s a way to make it completely non-destructive, that would be super. This might mean:

* it would refuse to undo if it would be destructive
* it might ask “are you sure, y/n?” or require an “-f”
* it might store states which would be destroyed so that they are recoverable, even if that means adding some heavier infrastructure (this could be a hack, like storing diffs or whatever you have to do, or a rewrite of part of git, or it could actually create a new state which clones the state you’re trying to get back to, but preserves revision history, like reverting a Wikipedia article. The latter would be pretty heavy but i dunno – just throwing options out there)

Keep up the good work.

One other joy is that I have started RUNning errands. Seriously. I RUN them. Makes them so much more enjoyable and the short bursts of exercise are great. I hope all your runs are well!

But, it does look like git reflog could be our key to one really awesome feature for git undo and git redo.

Having undo and redo are keys for usability. They let users explore without fear of messing up the system.

It would be great to have:
# undo what ever git command I just did
git undo

# wait, redo that last git command. undo my undo
git redo

hg and bzr do not yet have this feature. We’ll start simple though. And, keep this one in mind for the future.

Your ideas are a first step toward Gitsperanto.

also… what about git retreat instead of revert or undo?

https://github.com/kennethreitz/legit

It’d probably be worth basing your work around what he’s already done (a fork) if you haven’t already.

I’d love to have the ability to:

gum new directory_name

or something like that,
and have it setup a new git with remote, much like github mac.

On the name, gum is all wrong. I’d call it git. I don’t know that this is the perfect proposal to clean up the git CLI, but something like this should be done to core git.

BTW, there is still one mention of undo instead of rewind in the post. Also, “rewind” doesn’t have the right connotation for me. How about “revert” (oops, taken). OK, how about “unchanged” or “re” or something like that?

It is better to make this wrapper work with any underlying DVCS or VCS, automatically discovering whether it is in the git, hg, bzr or svn repository, and implementing the same interface for all of them.

grb (git remote branch) is a ruby gem that adds the grb command. Very useful for branching, switching branches, fixing branches, etc. Sets up the remotes and everything for you. A great UI ontop of git branching.

git stash show -p | git apply && git stash drop

If you really want to make a better cli for it, than I believe it should do what user expects it to do, for example:
svn user does not know the commands, so he tries first the commands that he/she knows, git fails here.

Look how mercurial made it: most of the commands make sense, and a person without prior knowledge of hg can somehow work with it.

I wish you would keep Undo, since it quite clearly defines the intention. Paired with a confirmation dialog, it would work just fine.

Rewind is imo not a good keyword, it reminds me of old Walkman cassette players and not a Git specific function.