Following from yesterday’s tip, suppose you have a branch that you plan to merge, but before the merge is committed, you want to verify things. Perhaps you want to hit F5 or perform some other testing. In other words, you are telling git, “Do the merge, but allow me to hit the commit button.”

I guess this is an inverse of “sudo make me a sandwich” which would be “hey sudo, about that sandwich, if you take all the stuff out of the refrigerator, I’ll finish making it myself.”

git merge –no-ff –no-commit branch-name

Note: I’m using the –no-ff option because I don’t have an actual merge conflict in my branch, so I need to tell git not to do a fast-forward.

If you do a `git status` you’ll see that all conflicts fixed, but you’re still merging, just as the scary (master|MERGING) tells you.

Notice how the next line tells you to do a `git commit`and the Changes to be committed looks like a good old staging message.

From here, we just need to do a `git commit` (which would open your `git config core.editor` – mine is set to notepad. baby steps)

Or you could skip the editor (in case the scary Vi appears) and do

git commit -m “my merge message”

And doing a `git log` shows the initial readme being added, then the commit from the mybranch4, then the merge commit!

I feel that a lot of Git tutorials forget what that raw, primal panic feels like when you see your branch name change to (master|MERGING). For me personally, 80% of the panic comes from not knowing “how do I get out of this state?! How can we pretend this never happened??”

Today’s tip is about how to get into and out of a merge conflict state, without creating any actual conflicts! I say no conflicts because the easier the setup, the easier it will be to practice, and eventually you’ll build up enough muscle memory to stay calm in future situations.

I have a branch called mybranch3 that simply contains a new file (e.g. touch myfile.txt). If I did just a `git merge –no-commit mybranch3` git would apply a fast-forward, so you have to add the –no-ff. I guess the fast-forward check take precedence in the git world. 

The –no-commit tells Git not to automatically do a merge commit, but rather, let you manually do the merge commit, as we’ll see in tomorrow’s tip.

You could do a `git status` to figure out how to finish the merge (e.g. `git commit -m “merging mybranch3″`), but today’s tip is about practicing, “I’m taking my ball and going home.” You show Git who’s boss!

You’ll want to run the command `git merge –abort`

and as you see from the `git log –oneline`, nothing was merged in from mybranch3. (the readme commit was my initial commit. I guess saying initial commit would have made more sense.)

P.S. this was my original vision for this series: take each option of each git command, play with it, try to break it, and blog about it. And it’s still my vision! But got to get through some of the more conceptual stuff first. I also want to get to the internal plumbing of trees, blobs, etc. Maybe in December 😉