Use Vim visual blocks during interactive git rebase

vim-visual-blocks.md

Sometimes, when rebasing interactively with git, we need to squash a sequence of commits in a branch.

For example, we need to transform this:

pick 0253dc894f bumped
pick 5a1e86933c remove dependency
pick bffoffb395 memberships rpc resource
pick 222fabf5e0 rpc membership service
pick 726a2f9a10 remove crypto logic

To this:

squash 0253dc894f bumped
squash 5a1e86933c remove dependency
squash bffoffb395 memberships rpc resource
squash 222fabf5e0 rpc membership service
pick 726a2f9a10 remove crypto logic

Doing that manually one by one can be a bit tiresome, so if you're using Vim you can use visual blocks:

1. Place the cursor at the beginning of the line with the first commit you want to squash
2. Enter visual block mode (CTRL-V)
3. Select all the rows you want to squash
4. Hit 'c' and type 'squash' to replace the 'pick' command
5. Press ESC to apply that change to all the selected rows

What worked for me: :%s/pick/squash/g to replace all instances of pick with squash + manually updating the first one to be a pick.

goat

Perfect, thanks for sharing this.