Interactive Rebase - Tidy Your History

git rebase -i

You've already seen plain git rebase replay commits onto a new base. Interactive rebase uses that same replaying mechanism, but lets you edit your own recent (local, unpushed) commits along the way - reorder them, merge several into one, fix a typo in a message, or throw a commit away entirely, before anyone else ever sees them.

$ git rebase -i HEAD~4        # edit the last 4 commits

This opens a text editor listing those commits, oldest first, each with a verb you can change:

Verb	Action
`pick`	Keep the commit exactly as-is (the default for every line)
`reword`	Keep the changes, but let you edit the commit message
`squash`	Merge this commit into the previous one, combining both messages for you to edit
`fixup`	Like squash, but silently discards this commit's message and keeps only the previous one's
`drop`	Delete the commit entirely, as if it never happened
(reorder the lines)	Changes the order commits are replayed in

Tip: The classic use case: you've got "add feature", "fix typo", "oops", "actually works now" as four separate local commits. Change the last three to fixup (or squash if you want to keep/edit their messages) and rebase turns all four into one clean commit before you ever open a PR. git commit --fixup=<hash> followed by git rebase -i --autosquash even automates finding and ordering the right fixup commits for you.

Danger: Interactive rebase rewrites commit IDs, exactly like plain rebase - because it is a rebase under the hood, just with edits applied along the way. Only run it on local, unpushed commits, or a branch that's genuinely only ever used by you. Never rewrite shared history that someone else has already pulled and might have built more commits on top of.