Overview

Concepts

1. Changes & Status:
   • a file can be tracked or untracked which indicates whether the file is recognized by git as part of the repository.
   • a change includes added, deleted, modified at the minimum unit of lines.
   • staging meaning that you're selectively picking untracked files or changes into bucket, and waiting for committing them.
2. Commit: With staged changes, you're ready to generate a new snapshot, which is called commit.
   • commits constructs a acyclic graph representing all revisions of your repository.
   • you can rollback to one snapshot by reset.
3. Branching: a special form of commit that can represent a divergence of the commit graph.
   • each branch is essentially a dynamic head commit of that divergence, it can traverse back to its start point to delineated the branch.
   • branching is all about how to attach/detach a commit
4. History & Reset
   • inspect local history reflog and commit history log
     • each history is just a commit, tracked or wild, attached or detached
   • use bisect to binary search the commit introduced bad things.
   • revert changes of a commit by git revert(with revert commit)
   • reset to commit with altered history
5. Synchronization: working with remotes and locals
   • download remote branches by fetch
   • merge or rebase remote branches
   • use pull as shortcut of fetch plus merge/rebase

Getting Help

git help <subcommand> is the builtin command to show man page of the specified subcommand on UNIX or opening documentation html page on Windows

For example, open documentation for git clone subcommand:

git help clone