Git restore to discard changes

git checkout does a lot, from switching branches, viewing a codebase at a point in its history, to discarding uncommitted changes to a file. Just as I’ve stopped using checkout to switch branches, I’ve found a better way to clear changes than using checkout: git restore.

Let’s say I’ve made some changes to my homepage that I don’t want to keep; I’d get rid of them with:

git checkout index.html

I could also restore the file to its pre-edited state, as it was at the last commit using:

git restore index.html

This command feels more intuitive. My guess is that checkout was used for this because we’d be checking out a commit at a particular point in time. So here we’re moving back to the most recent commit of the index.html file, discarding anything that has happened since then. But that’s a total guess, and it’s not very easy to remember that that’s one of the things checkout is for.

restore, on the other hand, is exactly what we want to do: restore the file to its state before we started tinkering.

More power

It’s not just a like-for-like, as switch is. git restore can do much more than git checkout when it comes to restoring files. You can:

• discard changes within a folder/directory with git restore src/site, for example
• use an asterisk as a wildcard with git restore *.md to discard all of your changes to Markdown files
• combine a directory and a file type with git restore src/site/*.md
• throw out all of your changes, regardless of filetype or directory using git restore . (actually, you can do that with git checkout --, but I like that the . follows the same pattern as git add)
• discard changes to staged files by using the --staged (or -S) flag: git restore --staged index.html (or git restore -S index.html using the shorthand)
• restore a previously committed version of a file by using --source (or -s): git restore --source abc1234 index.html (or git restore -s abc1234 index.html using the shorthand)

That extra power together with the easier to remember command make git restore a better choice than git checkout. Using git restore and git switch also means git checkout is left for the thing it sounds like it’s for: checking out previous commits!