One good habit I have been trying to get into is committing my work in my feature branch as I go along, that serves a couple of purposes:

• I don’t have to worry about losing my work with stashes. I use to rely on stash a lot & had run into quite a few instances where I almost lost my work in progress.
• I can keep track of changes if something suddenly breaks. Basic idea is to make incremental changes.

Finally when I am ready to put up a pull request I can clean up those commits so that reviewer can easily review my pull request.

And sometimes you come across a commit where you realize you could have committed some files or changes as a separate, standalone meaningful commit. That’s where interactive rebase comes in handy.

I created a demo folder called pull-request-demo & initialized an empty git repository using git init to show how did I do it. Let’s suppose I am working on a feature branch called feature-1:

• Let’s create a new branch using git checkout -b feature-1

• Suppose the feature involves adding initial js files & we do that & we keep committing as we progress.

• We feel we are now ready to put up a pull request so let’s review our commits & funny enough, we come across a commit that can be split into two commits. Then let’s start an interactive rebase using git rebase -i HEAD~{number-of-commits}.

• It will bring something like this, yours may be a bit different:

• In my case it was the commit with the hash 10eef8b. Since it is vim, we have to use vim’s insert mode by pressing i & going to the line using the arrow keys.

• One of my favourite things about interactive rebase & vim is that how it has a handy section below the commits to show us what options we can use. For our purpose, we have to use edit. Change pick to edit & press esc key to get out of insert mode.

• Now in order to order to proceed, we need to save this. We can use :wq for that.

• Rebase will now stop just after the commit you want to edit & then you would want to do git reset HEAD~.

• From then on, commit the pieces you want to be in individual commits & when you’re done you can do git rebase --continue to finish the interactive rebase. If your changes are on remote as well, you may need to force push your changes via git push -f.

There you have it, changes separated in individual commits. It’s up to you if you want to squash those commits further using the interactive rebase but now the difference would be that you would need to replace pickup with squash or fixup option to do that.