Sometimes you recognize that your change history is a bit of a mess. One commit contains multiple different types of changes, possibly even some refactoring.

In this post I describe my (current) workflow to handle that. Git being git, this might not be the only one, possibly not even the best way to do it!

First you need to know which commit is affected.

Last commit

If you happen to remember that the disastrous commit was the one you just did, you are in luck, as the process is quite easy.

When commiting my changes, I like to keep the commits as simple and atomic as possible. My basic workflow for that is to check all the changed files, choose the respective lines which have been changed, add them to the commit and commit all of my selected changes.

Jetbrains IDEs incorporate a beautiful commit GUI, where you can do all of that. But as there are days where I am not using a Jetbrains IDE, I asked myself how such a workflow might be possible using the tools at hand - the tools offered by the git command.