Rebasing with VC

Two weeks without Magit¹ have forced me to rethink how I use Git in my projects. I have already written about some commands I have been using, but beside basic things, how does Emacs hold up in a more complex situation?

Let’s talk about interactive rebasing. If you are familiar with Magit,² you know how simple it gets. This is what I usually do from magit-status:

• l for magit-log
• l for current
• n as many times as needed to move to the commit I want to start rebasing with
• r for magit-rebase
• i for interactive
• s on the commits I want to squash
• C-c C-c to confirm
• write the commit message I want
• C-c C-c to confirm
• P and -f to push with --force-with-lease enabled

It’s quicker to do it than to write it all down, especially now that it has become muscle memory. No wonder I was still relying on Magit to interactively rebase on my first days with VC.

Since I did not find a similar solution in vc-git, I asked on emacs-devel how the core developers approach this workflow.³ I got different, interesting replies that can be roughly summed up with:

• bare command line
• helm-ls-git
• custom code

Not wanted to be scared away from a non-Magit option, this is what I have eventually ended up doing:

• in shell-mode, I run git rebase -i <branch>~<commits>
• in the buffer that opens up I type s on the commits I want to squash
• C-x C-s
• C-x k RET
• in the buffer with the commit message I edit the text as I wish
• C-x C-s
• C-x k RET
• either I run git push --force-with-lease from shell-mode, or C-u P from C-x p v to push with --force-with-lease added manually

Note that this approach requires that in ~/.config/git/config I have editor set to emacsclient and either I have server-start somewhere in my init.el or I do M-x server-start before starting the actual rebasing.

It looks like that even without Magit I can do everything from Emacs, which makes for a good alternative in my opinion. Nonetheless, it does not take a PhD to notice that Magit makes the whole rebasing easier to sort out. Hence, you will not hear me scream “drop it already and party hard, fellas!”. Sorry.