Shuffling committed changes between git branches and then deleting them on the source

Question

Please note: I understand my question is very similar to this one -- however there IS a slight difference! Please ready this question in its entirety!

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New to git, I made a bunch of changes on my project's develop branch, whereas it seems I should have cut a feature branch off of develop first and made my changes there. I have already added ( git add . ) and committed ( git commit -m "blah" ) my changes but I have not pushed them yet.

I'm hoping there is a way to:

1. Create a new branch off of my local develop and move my changes over to it
2. Reset my local develop so that its as if I never made changes to develop in the first place

From the question I referenced above, it seems that the correct solution is something like this:

git checkout -b newbranch
git merge develop
git checkout develop
git reset --hard HEAD~X # Go back X commits
git checkout newbranch

Here's how my question is different than the one I mentioned:

The problem is: this is a very active project and MANY (30+) commits by MANY other developers have transpired since I started making my local changes.

So I'm note sure what the real value of HEAD~X needs to be!

Ideally, I'd like to just say: " Hey git , whatever is the latest on the remote develop , yeah, set my local develop to that commit and completely blow out/erase any of my committed changes to it. "

Is this possible to do?

Answer 1

You are on the right track. Just create a new branch from the current point in your local develop branch, then reset off the commits you added:

# from develop
git branch newbranch
git reset --hard HEAD~1   # assuming you only made one commit

Replace the 1 in HEAD~1 with however many commits you did actually make to develop before realizing that your work belonged in its own branch.