If you make a mistake in a commit message but HAVEN'T pushed it yet, you can change that commit message with --amend:

git commit --amend -m "New message"

This won't change any of the files in your commit - but will rewrite the commit with the new message.

To start a new Git project, go to New on Github and enter a repository name. After creating the repository, find the clone link for the repo and git clone <repo-link>. You can then cd into that folder and touch index.html to create your first file. Inside your index.html file you can insert code and add the file to your commit.

index.html

You can do a git status and see that the index.html is an untracked file. Once you git add index.html, it stages the file and prepares it for a commit. You can commit that with a message like git commit -m "Adding index.html to git-mistokes".

After typing the commit message, we see we typed it incorrectly and want to change it. Since we haven't pushed it yet, you can use git commit --amend -m "Adding index.html to git-mistakes" to change the message. Now, if we git log --oneline, we can see the initial commit Github made to the project along with our rewritten message Adding index.html to git-mistakes.

Personal Take

git commit --amend is a very useful feature I know I'll use in the future should I mess up my commit messages. There are plenty of times I would simply just abandon a commit to retype a message, as I had no idea this feature existed. I like the simplicity of this lesson, the approach helps all levels of experience.

✏️ Edit on GitHub