Undo File Changes with Git

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One of my favorite features in modern text editors is their ability to integrate tools to format code upon every save.  When you're working on legacy projects, however, auto-formatting can be a problem; if you open a file that you don't explicitly change, the file may still get modified by the formatter.  This all leads to git status showing a bunch of file modifications that you don't want.

To quickly undo file changes with git, execute the following two commands:

git reset HEAD path/to/file.ext
git checkout path/to/file.ext

The second command (checkout) is required or you'll still see the file listed when running git status again.  With both of those executions, you'll no longer see the file listed with git status.

git makes version control easy but the two steps needed to essentially revert changes to a file aren't intuitive, thus I thought I would share on this blog.  Happy coding!

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  1. I’m pretty sure you don’t need the

    git reset HEAD path/to/file.ext


    I’ve always just used

    git checkout path/to/file.ext
