Interactive rebasing

Interactive rebasing gives you the opportunity to alter commits as they are moved to the new branch. This is even more powerful than an automated rebase, since it offers complete control over the branch's commit history. Typically, this is used to clean up a messy history before merging a feature branch into master.

To begin an interactive rebasing session, pass the i option to the git rebase command:

git checkout feature
git rebase -i master

This will open a text editor listing all of the commits that are about to be moved:

pick 33d5b7a Message for commit #1
pick 9480b3d Message for commit #2
pick 5c67e61 Message for commit #3

This listing defines exactly what the branch will look like after the rebase is performed. By changing the pick command and/or re-ordering the entries, you can make the branch's history look like whatever you want. For example, if the 2nd commit fixes a small problem in the 1st commit, you can condense them into a single commit with the fixup command:

pick 33d5b7a Message for commit #1
fixup 9480b3d Message for commit #2
pick 5c67e61 Message for commit #3

When you save and close the file, Git will perform the rebase according to your instructions, resulting in project history that looks like the following:

Eliminating insignificant commits like this makes your feature's history much easier to understand. This is something that git merge simply cannot do.

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