Git helper

How do I… — about sixty recipes for the things people search for: undo a commit (pushed or not), discard changes, recover a lost branch, rename and clean up branches, rebase versus merge, push after a rebase, squash, bisect, remove a leaked secret from history, worktrees, sparse checkouts. Type a few words to filter. Recipes marked careful rewrite history or discard work: read the note first, and remember git reflog can usually bring back a commit you lost.

.gitignore — tick operating systems, editors, languages, embedded and game-engine tools (templates condensed from GitHub’s github/gitignore collection), add your own patterns, and download the merged, de-duplicated file. Type paths in Test paths to see which are ignored and by which rule — negations (!), anchored patterns (/build), directory patterns (dist/), and ** work as in git. git check-ignore -v <path> is the final word.

Commit messages — build a Conventional Commit: type, optional scope, ! and a BREAKING CHANGE: footer for breaking changes, a body wrapped at 72 columns, and footers such as Closes #12. The linter checks the header format, length (50 ideal, 72 maximum), the blank line after the header, imperative mood, and full stops, and says which semantic-version bump the message implies (feat → minor, fix → patch, breaking → major). Paste any message into Check a message to lint it. Copy as command gives a git commit -F - heredoc ready for the terminal.

.gitattributes & branches — presets for line-ending normalisation, binary files, Git LFS for media and CAD, retro disk images, language-aware diffs, and collapsing generated files on GitHub; and a branch-name maker (feature/142-add-dark-mode).