Revert a bad rebase or force push

Let's consider a couple of opsies that I think we all experienced in our carrier, unless to avoid rebase wholeheartedly.

"I rebased back to my previous commit but it turned out I need those changed and typing it out again would take a whole day"

Git stores all the "moves" that happened in your local git repository. A "move" is when the tips of branches and other references were updated (so e.g. rebase or new commit). Running git reflog shows us something like this:

97b72ce (HEAD -> main, origin/main) HEAD@{0}: commit: add BlogList style to tags
20affa7 HEAD@{1}: commit: add docker tag; smaller gap
21d098a HEAD@{2}: commit: fix hidden timestamp
158d3a4 HEAD@{3}: commit: hide date under small

On the left side we see what happened and on the right side we see the hash and the HEAD reference HEAD@{N} where N indicated how many moves before that happened. To reset to that move, we can simply run:

git reset HEAD@{2}

And now we avoided the disaster, we saved one day of typing.

"I force pushed to a PR and now many days of work have been lost"

Do not panic, there's a solution and it is pretty simple. On the PR we can checkout the force push:

person force-pushed the main branch from 7f1ee6c to cbdb543 2 minutes ago

Here the cbdb543 has been replaced with the 7f1ee6c hash, so let's revert this:

git reset --hard cbdb543

And push it:

git push --force

...aaand we done! Catastropy has been resolved.