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I usually solve this by commiting my fixup in a dummy commit, then do a rebase -i HEAD~n where n is the number of commits I want to look back at. Then during the rebase I just move my commit below the one that seem the most appropriate and mark it for squash. Execute the rebase. Done

Wow, I never realized that changing the order of commits in an interactive rebase was a legit operation.

Thanks for the tip!

Another way to handle this if you haven't made the change yet is to do a `git rebase -i head~4` (or however far back) and mark the place where the change needs to happen as "edit". Make your change, add the file, then `git rebase --continue`.

If you've already made the change but haven't committed it, you can stash it before doing the rebase, then pop the stash while editing that commit.

If you have `fzf` installed you might try this alias.

    frbi = "!f() { git rebase -i $(git log --pretty=oneline --color=always | fzf --ansi | cut -d ' ' -f1)^ ; }; f"

I do: `git frbi` (which in my mind means Fzf ReBase Interactive)

Then I can easily scroll up to the commit I want to start the rebase on.

Not as quick as you're asking for, but what I do, after running "git log" to jog my memory of what the commit message was, is this:

  git commit --fixup=':/message regexp'

This will find the youngest commit where the message matches the "message regexp" pattern. See also: https://git-scm.com/docs/gitrevisions

Boy have I got the thing for you. git absorb - https://github.com/tummychow/git-absorb

The way to work with it is:

    git add file1
    git commit -m "Fix some bug in file1"
    git add file2
    git commit -m "Add a feature flag for file1"
    # Oh no, first commit was borked, need to fix it
    git add file1
    git absorb
    # this will now automatically create one or more fixup commits
    git rebase -i --autosquash $(git merge-base master)
    # voila, tidy history and each commit works

This was my bugbear for a long time too, and then I found fzf-git.sh (actually its PowerShell equivalent, PSFzf).

fzf (absolutely incredible tool with many uses) gives you fuzzy searching of anything you care to name, and fzf-git combines this with shell key bindings to let you pop up a fuzzy-searchable list of branches/commits/tags/whatever while typing your fixup command, then paste the object you select into your in-progress command line.

No more counting commits in log output to know how many ^ to put after HEAD, or copying out segments of commit SHAs!

https://github.com/tummychow/git-absorb Does a very nice job of this for me.

>> git absorb will automatically identify which commits are safe to modify, and which staged changes belong to each of those commits. It will then write fixup! commits for each of those changes.

This looks like exactly what I wanted. Thank you!

Lazygit allows you to easily « add » your stated changes to any commit (doing a rebase under the hood). Stage stuff, find the commit (the UI helps to quickly find the right commit) and press « a » for amend.

It’s not quite as automatic as you describe, but it’s super quick if you vaguely know what commit you want to amend and there’s no magic happening: just a good ui

Ty. I've seen similar in other tools, and I agree that it's super quick... unless you sign your commits with a key that requires a physical touch of a yubikey. Then it's <tap> <wait> <tap> <wait> for every commit that comes after the one you just modified.

I do this a lot in lazygit, or at least something that sounds similar: I’ve got some changes, I stage them by pressing spacebar (or hitting enter and adding lines in a more granular way), and then switch to the Commits tab, arrow down to the one I want to add this change to (all the unpushed ones are red) and hit A to amend.

I can’t solve the whole problem for you, but you can `git commit --fixup HEAD~4` if you know it’s 5 commits back. No need to figure out the hash. `HEAD^^^^` would also work — sometimes if I have to repeatedly fixup the same commit, adding an additional ^ to a previous command is easiest.

Lazygit maintainer here: I've found myself in your shoes quite a bit (without the commit signing part) and a few weeks ago I put up a draft PR where if a file is selected, it highlights the commits that touch that file. Typically you want to amend the most recent commit that changed the file and typically that commit is visible without needing to scroll. But I haven't spent much time thinking about what the ideal UX is, how to activate it, etc.

PR: https://github.com/jesseduffield/lazygit/pull/2654

I want this too. We just shipped "amend from status" allowing you to push staged files into the HEAD commit. It's only a small step to add selection of the commit to amend.

Feel free to make a PR. If not, I'll probably queue it up to work on at some point.