Rebase essentially means "create new commits out of old commits", the original use being to "move" a set of commits from one branch to another (think of the nam

Rebase essentially means "create new commits out of old commits", the original use being to "move" a set of commits from one branch to another (think of the name as meaning, to change the base these commits started from). There's a few special cases that have their own names, a common one is when you amend a commit - to do that manually you'd make a new commit, then use interactive rebase to squash the two commits together into a new one (or, use the "fixup" command available in that tool, which is a squash that automatically picks the first commit message instead of asking for a new one). Squash merges will squash a whole branch into a single commit, rebasing it onto the target in the process, and then fast-forward the target to the new commit. It's a tightly controlled use of rebase, and can be thought of a bit like how "for", "foreach", and "while" loops are a tightly controlled use of "goto", an abstraction built on top of a far more flexible tool.