Thread (6 messages) 6 messages, 6 authors, 17d ago

Programmatically edit the git rebase sequence?

From: Matthias Beyer <hidden>
Date: 2026-07-03 12:10:03

Hi git people,

in a recent conversation at work, the question of how to
programmatically edit the git-rebase sequence came up.

Example use case:

I have a branch that touches a number of files, adds some files and
removes some files.
When rebasing, I want to split all commits that touched a certain subset
of files, for the clearity of the history.

I look at the output of

    git log master..mybranch --oneline --diff-filter=M -- "./subdir/*.rs"

to find all commits in that subdir that only touched the files. All of
these commits are to be "edit"ed.

Now I fire up `git rebase -i master` and manually(!) match the list from
above `git-log` call and find the respective commits to edit them.

Is there a way I am not aware of to do that manual step programatically?
Something like

    git rebase -i master --edit-commits="$(git log master..mybranch --diff-filter=M --format="%H" -- "./subdir/*.rs")"

would be convenient here, although I would understand if that is too
much clutter for the already very heavy git CLI interface :-)

Maybe I am just not aware of the obvious solution - I would be happy to
learn that there is already one!

Best,
Matthias

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