I've searched to find many answers relating to my question but they don't do exactly what I want, and I'm not sure how else to describe it.

Lets say I make a commit called remove tracking and I remove 10 lines of code.

I want to essentially "undo" this commit but leaving the branch untouched, and leaving the old commit exactly as it is. Almost as if I said "oh I need to undo those changes" and I manually copy and paste from the red parts of the diff and paste them where they need to go, and have those changes be unstaged.

Often times I make lots of undo/redo related to split tests, and this workflow would be much more favorable than actually TRULY "undoing" the commit. I want to really just take the last commit and do the inverse of it and put that into unstaged, and nothing more.

The reason I want it unstaged is because usually after undoing it I need to make further changes to the undo, which is why I dont want an 'actual' undo

CodePudding user response：

Like "I want to get this file back to how it was on HEAD~"?

git checkout HEAD~ -- the-file
git reset the-file # so that it is out of the index

This is the new approach, if I recall correctly:

git restore --worktree HEAD~ -- the-file

If you need to take the whole thing back instead of a single file, use . instead of the-file in the recipes.

CodePudding user response：

This is exactly what git revert does:

Given one or more existing commits, revert the changes that the related patches introduce, and record some new commits that record them.

Use --no-commit flag and use git reset to remove the changes from staging area.

The answer by @eftshift0 works if the commit you want to undo is the previous one. git revert works even if the commit you want to undo is done earlier in the history.