Understanding Common Git Commands: Merge, Rebase, Reset, Revert, Fetch, Pull, and Reflog

This article provides a visual and textual guide to essential Git commands, explaining how they manipulate branches and history.

git merge combines changes from one branch into another, with fast‑forward and no‑fast‑forward modes; fast‑forward moves the branch pointer without a new commit, while no‑ff creates a merge commit.

git rebase reapplies commits of the current branch onto another base, producing a linear history and avoiding merge conflicts; interactive rebase allows editing, squashing, fixing up, dropping, or reordering commits.

git reset moves HEAD to a specified commit. A soft reset keeps changes staged, while a hard reset discards all working‑directory and index changes, restoring the repository to the target commit.

git revert creates a new commit that undoes the changes introduced by a previous commit without altering history.

git cherry-pick copies a specific commit from another branch onto the current branch.

git fetch downloads objects and refs from a remote without merging; git pull combines fetch and merge to update the local branch automatically.

git reflog records updates to HEAD, allowing recovery of lost commits and enabling resets to previous states.