Git soft reset following revert deleted files changes

Question

I wanted to undo a commit, using IntelliJ I right-clicked on the last commit and then clicked "Revert Commit". A message told me no changes were made. By looking at the command log the command was:

revert 75d72c1c0746b225d3857 --no-commit

The reverted changes appear in the changelist (or in the staged files area using sourcetree). I realized it wasn't the correct command to do what I needed, so I used:

reset --soft HEAD^

The last commit was eliminated, but the edited files did not appear in the changelist. It was as if I executed a reset --hard .

I managed to recover changes in another way, but I don't understand why the soft reset acted as a hard reset.

Answer 1

Let's use a modified version of the example that @0x5453 gave in a comment:

git init
echo "hello\n" >> foo
git add foo
git commit -m "add foo"
echo "goodbye\n" >> foo
git commit -am "modify foo"

At this point, the file foo has the following contents:

hello
goodbye

And we have two commits, one for each line in the file.

Now, when you do

git revert --no-commit HEAD

This "undoes" the changes in the most recent commit. This appears as local changes that haven't been committed. If you do git status , you will see that foo is modified. Its contents are now

hello

which is the exact same as the first commit.

So now when you do

git reset --soft HEAD~

You reset back to the first commit. But since the contents of the file are exactly the same as that commit, you will not see any local changes.