git: obtain the benefits of `git rebase --interactive` for cherry picks

Question

I'd like to be able to do this:

git cherry-pick --interactive hash-0..hash-n-1  # fantasy command 

and obtain the same workflow as interactive rebase: an editor buffer comes up, containing:

pick hash-0 pick hash-1 pick hash-2 ... pick hash-n-1 

where I can delete any unwanted commits, squash them together, or edit to pause between the picks to do some manual fixup (like commit --amend) and all that.

Note how the pick of interactive rebase is tanalizingly like cherry-pick.

Now the above operation can be done by performing the cherry-pick first, and then the interactive rebase, which is inconvenient. That is:

$ git tag old-head  # mark starting point for later rebase $ git cherry-pick hash-0..hash-n-1    # get everything first $ git rebase --interactive old-head   # okay now rebase "in-branch" to fix it up 

It's not only inconvenient because of the two steps but because it may require resolving conflicts in commits you don't even want that will be discarded in the rebase stage.

Answer 1

Okay, figured out a nice hack.

Start a trivial rebase --interactive HEAD^ over one commit in your current branch. You get something like:

pick 1efd396b * Fixed a bug in frob function 

Now, just paste in additional hashes that you want to pick:

pick 1efd396b * Fixed a bug in frob function pick f01934db * Awesome feature added pick 6fd109c1 * Refactored the widgets layer squash 3900fd77 * Refactored the widgets layer s'more 

Save and exit, and wee: the rebase mule obligingly takes the additional cruft you loaded on its back and incorporates it into the current branch according to the commands.

You can actually do an empty rebase with:

git rebase --interactive HEAD 

you get a buffer containing

noop 

You don't have to delete that; just add your picks after that.

Addendum: To produce the pick lists for this method, use git log --oneline --reverse from..to, then trim the output needed and prepend the rebase commands to each line: pick, squash, ...