“Oops! That last commit message was screwed up. How do I edit an incorrect commit message?”

This usually happens to me when I intended to use just git commit but typed git commit -a and committed a whole bunch more stuff that I hadn’t mentioned in the commit message.

It’s easy to fix just the message for the last commit:

$ git commit --amend -m "New commit message"

Or leave off the -m "New commit message" and type the message in the text editor that opens.

Next: Exploring code and its history