How to undo unstaged changes in Git

When working with Git, you may often find yourself in a situation where you need to undo changes that you've made but haven't yet staged for commit. This can be necessary for a variety of reasons, such as making a mistake in your code, experimenting with something that didn't work out, or simply deciding to discard changes to start fresh. Whatever the reason, Git provides several tools to handle this situation.

Understanding unstaged changes

Unstaged changes are modifications in your working directory that have not been added to the staging area. Git allows you to see these changes by using the command:

git status

This command will list all the files that have been changed, added, or deleted, but not yet staged.

Methods to undo unstaged changes

Using the command line

Undo all unstaged changes

To undo all changes in your working directory, you can use the git checkout or git restore command. Since Git version 2.23, git restore is recommended as it's more explicit about what it does:

git restore .

This command will restore your working directory to match the last commit, effectively undoing all unstaged changes.

Undo specific file changes

If you only want to undo changes in specific files, you can specify those files in the command:

git restore file1.txt file2.txt

Replace file1.txt and file2.txt with the names of the files you wish to restore.

Using Git GUI tools

Git GUI

If you are using a graphical user interface (GUI) like Git GUI, you can undo changes by:

1. Opening Git GUI and navigating to the changed files.
2. Selecting the files you want to revert.
3. Right-clicking and choosing "Revert Changes" from the context menu.

This action will discard the changes in the selected files.

Using the command line in special cases

Sometimes you might want to remove untracked files or directories (those that are new and not added to Git). To clean your repository of these:

git clean -fd

This command removes untracked files (-f for "force") and directories (-d).

Considerations

• Safety: Always double-check which files you are reverting, especially in a shared repository. Undoing changes can't be easily reversed if those changes weren't committed or stashed.

• Stashing: If you think you might want to revisit your changes later, consider using git stash to save the changes temporarily instead of discarding them:

  Terminal

  git stash push -m "Work in progress"
  
  

For more information see the official Git documentation.