Git encourages you to create commits early and frequently, but I often find that my last commit isn’t quite as awesome as I’d like it to be. However, there are three little tricks I use to tweak it a bit.

The main use for amending your commit is changing your last commit message:

$ git commit --amend

However, if you add files before you amend your commit, those files will be combined with the commit. This is great if you missed a file, or if you forgot to save that very last change in your editor.

$ git add README.txt
$ git commit --amend

Amending your commit will bring up your editor to change your commit message; what should you do if your previous message was just fine? Just reuse the commit message!

$ git add README.txt
$ git commit --amend -C HEAD

This is conceptually the same as the “fixup” command when rebasing, so you could alias it as git fixup.

$ git add README.txt
$ git fixup

Update – 8:30 PM EDT

Nick Rutherford reminded me to caution everyone that you should never amend your commit after you have pushed it or made it public in some fashion. This is for the same reason that you should never rebase commits that are already public: you are changing history that other people may have already grabbed a copy of.