With all these recipies - one thing I do whenever I attempt some stunt in git: I assign temporary tags to every changeset that's important. git tag tmp

With all these recipies - one thing I do whenever I attempt some stunt in git: I assign temporary tags to every changeset that's important. git tag tmp git perform-stunt This eases undoing the stunt without needing to find the "before" state from reflog. And if you use a graphical log viewer (I like SourceTree on Mac) you'll see the tagged state in the history view - which makes things a lot clearer. And to be aware what happens, there one single explanation of git that helps a lot: http://eagain.net/articles/git-for-computer-scientists/ http://eagain.net/articles/git-for-computer-scientists/ As soon as you start viewing git as a graph of nodes with branches/tags just being "marked" nodes a lot of things make sense, and whatever "git perform-stunt" you attempt it's easy to explain within that mental model.