Here are some useful but less-common Git features.

git clean

This removes untracked files from the working tree. Why would you do this? Let’s say you run a build process that litters the working tree with temporary files in dozens of folders, instead of being neat and tidy and putting it in a build folder.

This will remove all untracked files, including ignored ones, and remove untracked directories as well:

git clean -d -x

There are a handful of options, but this is my preferred “make it really clean” approach. You can use this with git reset to get back to a pristine working directory.

git-clean

git pull –rebase

Prefer to pull with rebasing instead of merging. Generally, your local changes were meant to be applied to the tip of the remote repository, so why not get in the habit of keeping your files rebased?

git pull --rebase

This is essentially the same as this

git fetch
git rebase

You can also set a few entries in config so that this happens without needing the --rebase flag. To set this so master branch always rebases:

git config branch.master.rebase true

or to set it up so new branches always rebase automatically:

git config --global branch.autosetuprebase always

There will still be cases where you will want to merge, but generally this would be an explicit step of merging a (feature) branch onto a (production) branch.

git-pull

git-rebase

See what’s been cherry-picked

If you have a workflow where you are cherry-picking commits from one branch to another, it’s useful to see what has been cherry-picked. If you want to see what has and hasn’t been cherry-picked from the current branch to master:

git cherry -v master

This shows all commits on the current branch, prefixed with + for commits that have not yet been cherry-picked and with - for commits that have already been cherry-picked.