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Comment by nicois | Hacker News Reader

A large percentage of git users are unaware of git-absorb (https://github.com/tummychow/git-absorb). This complements just about any git flow, vastly reducing the pain of realising you want to amend your staged changes into multiple commits. This sits well alongside many TUIs and other tools, most of which do not offer any similar capability.

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I gave it a try a few months ago, and wasn't impressed. About a quarter of the time it got confused about the commit it should squash into, and left the repo in a half-applied state. This inconsistency was enough for me to not trust it when it did work, so I stopped using it.

Honestly, it's too much magic for my taste. And, really, it's not much manual work to create fixup commits for the right commit anyway.

I see the usefulness. But my client is magit, and committing and rebasing are so quick that this will reduce perhaps 30 seconds to one minute to my workflow. And I do not like most rust tools, because they're too dependency heavy.

Definitely. The instant fixup feature is just three keystrokes away (s c F). The only thing this helps is when you don't want to spend the extra brain cycles to figure out which commit to fixup on.

The task that absorb speeds up is finding the commit where each hunk was last changed. The actual committing and rebaseing is still basically the same.

Git blame using `M-x vc-annotate` with Emacs. But If I have a clean PR that usually means one to three commits (If it's not a big refactoring). So the whole point become moot. In magit, if you create a fixup or a squash commit, it will present you with the log to select the target.

Yes, or magit-blame, but if you still have multiple commits in your history that you are working on, and you need to break up the current changes in a bunch of instant fixups, figuring out which one is the right one can be a bit time consuming. I'm not convinced that automatically amending to the last commit that touched that line is safe, but I'm willing to try git-absorb.

> I'm not convinced that automatically amending to the last commit that touched that line is safe, but I'm willing to try git-absorb.

It is not, but git absorb only produces fixup commits, you can still change what they change in the autosquash step.

It's in the GNU/Debian repo and I guess in a lot of other distros as well.

to me this appears to be trading off a valid change log for neat naming ... i dont see why rewriting history is ever a good idea

I find it quite hard to follow PRs when there is a lot of rebasing. I don't really find separate non-time-based commits useful.

So I agree but unfortunately it's the norm and policy for some clients.

Git-absord by default doesn't squash the fixups though, it creates new ones with special tags for easy rebasing later.

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