Learn Git Without Panic: 68 Flashcards on Commands, Objects and Merge Strategies
Master Git with 68 real flashcards: commands from init to rebase, the object store, merge strategies, reflog recovery and two study tricks that make it stick.
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Git is hard not because the commands are hard, but because it is a leaky abstraction: git checkout does four unrelated things, reset and revert sound identical but behave nothing alike, and nobody tells you a commit is just a pointer to a tree of blobs. Memorizing the surface without the object model is why the same three commands get googled every week.
Study this deck: Git: Commands & Workflows
1 / 10Git
Tap the card for the answer · swipe right if you knew it, left if not
The Git: Commands & Workflows deck (code QI3907, 68 cards) on Flip It fixes that by drilling both layers at once: the command line you type, and the plumbing underneath it.
A sample of the deck
| Card front | Card back |
|---|---|
git fetch | Downloads commits, files and refs from a remote repository without merging |
git rebase | Moves or combines a sequence of commits to a new base commit, creating a linear history |
git cherry-pick | Applies changes from a specific commit to the current branch |
git bisect | Uses binary search to find the commit that introduced a bug |
git reflog | Shows a log of where HEAD and branches have been (useful for recovering lost commits) |
| HEAD in Git | A reserved reference that points to the currently checked-out commit or branch |
| Git blob | An object that stores the content of a file, without filename, timestamp or metadata |
| Octopus merge strategy | Git's default strategy for merging more than two branches at once |
| Fast-forward merge | When Git can merge by simply moving the branch pointer forward because there are no divergent changes |
Everything the 68 cards cover
Commands: init, clone, add, commit -m, status, push, pull, fetch, merge, branch, checkout -b, log, diff, reset, reset --hard, revert, stash, stash pop, remote add origin, tag, rm, mv, blame, bisect, grep, gc, fsck, config, archive, clean, describe, reflog, plus the modern switch and restore.
Concepts: the staging area (also called index or cache), .gitignore, detached HEAD state, origin, main versus master, merge conflicts, the three-way merge algorithm, the recursive and octopus strategies, fast-forward merges, Git-flow branch conventions, pull requests as a hosting-service feature rather than a Git one, SHA-1 hashing, the five object types (blob, tree, commit, tag, packfile), delta compression, Git LFS, JGit and libgit2, GitHub, GitLab, Bitbucket and SourceForge, and the BitKeeper licence revocation of 2005 that made Linux abandon its previous version control system.
Two study tricks specific to Git
Sort every command card into one of three zones before you review it. Git only ever moves data between the working directory, the staging area and the repository (plus the remote). git add goes directory to index, git commit goes index to repository, git push goes repository to remote. Once you label a card with its zone, confusing commands become obvious: reset --hard wipes all three back to a commit, while revert touches none of them and simply adds a new commit on top.
Drill the recovery cards before you need them. git reflog, git revert, git stash pop and git fsck are the cards you will reach for while panicking, which is exactly when recall fails. Review them in their own short session and pair each with one question: does this rewrite history? Rebase and reset --hard do; revert and reflog do not. That distinction prevents most of the damage beginners do to shared branches.
Study it alongside the Linux command line deck — the two share a terminal, and the muscle memory transfers.
Open Flip It, search the library for deck QI3907, and start with the fifteen commands you already half-know.
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