🔫 git unstage as a service
There are at least nine ways to unstage files in a Git repository. Remembering which versions of Git support which syntax, under which circumstances, reduced my productivity enough to publish this software in response.
This is a command-line shell plugin for undoing git add. Too many
staged files? Can’t remember if it’s git reset HEAD or
git restore --staged --? Just remember gunstage or git unstage.
gunstage works exactly as you would expect it to as it performs the opposite
of git add. You can unstage directories and specific files in as few
commands as you’d like:
gunstage file1.txt file2.txt directory/.
Want to unstage everything? Well that’s as easy as
gunstage --all or gunstage -A.
There is no git unstage command packaged as part of Git’s
default tooling. While git restore --staged often performs the task,
it’s not an obvious formula based on Git’s other commands.
git restore --staged is also unreliable, having
entered
Git’s vocabulary in 2019, after some 14 years of releases
without it. Many older releases remain in the wild and git restore
causes them to fail and choke. This software gracefully and silently accounts
for those situations by always sending the syntax that Git used from 2005 until
2019: git reset.
Instead of keeping up with the latest incarnation of Git, whose manual says
git restore “IS EXPERIMENTAL” and “THE BEHAVIOR MAY CHANGE” (emphasis
in original), you
can let this script do the remembering for you.
To unstage content in a Git repository – that is, to undo a
git add – you must remember which
commands are still in use out of the many I’m aware of having been
recommended so far:
Next, you must be aware of repository context: if the repository is new
and no commit has occurred yet, then git restore --staged won’t work,
but gunstage will.
gunstage # 🔫 git unstage as a service
git unstage # 🔫 it just works!Its name is an abbreviation and portmanteau of git unstage arising by
analog from
Oh My Zsh’s
other Git aliases.
The scripts are written in Bourne shell-flavored, KornShell- and Zsh-compatible
Bash, which is masquerading as ZÂ shell with a .zsh filename extension so
Oh My Zsh recognizes it as a plugin. What does that mean? The
syntax is
as
low-tech as possible while performing sophisticated work to do one thing and
do it well: git unstage.
gunstage can be
installed as a
plugin or you can just clone this repository, run the following command, and
then restart your terminal:
$ printf '%s\n' '. /path/to/gunstage.plugin.zsh' \
>>"${HOME%/}"'/.'"${SHELL##*[-./]}"'rc'I tested gunstage atop Zsh 5.8 and Bash 3.2 using Git:
-
2.17 on Ubuntu 18.04,
-
2.20 on Debian 9.12,
-
2.28, 2.29, and 2.30 on macOS 11.0 and Alpine 3.11 and 3.12, and
This repository’s preview image was created by Twitter in 2018.
