git restore –staged vs git rm –cached

October 25, 2022

I have read about git restore vs git rm –cached, but my question does not ask about the result of the above commands.

I used both Pycharm and Visual Studio Code to coding, and I realize there is a little difference.

On Pycharm, I can use git restore --staged to undo git add but on Visual Studio raise a error fatal: could not resolve HEAD

Example: I created two files and staging them with git add

And then, I want to use git restore –staged to unstaged one of two files, but raise a error.

I try git restore --staged on pycharm, it worked fine

git restore –staged work fine

I don’t want to urge about which one to use unstage file, I just want to know why there is a difference on Pycharm and Visual Studio Code.

Thanks

>Solution :

The two are entirely different commands:

git restore is about copying some file(s) from somewhere to somewhere.
git rm is about removing some file(s) from somewhere.

Because git restore is about copying a file or files, it needs to know where to get the files. There are three possible sources:

the current, or HEAD, commit (which must exist); or
any arbitrary commit that you specify (which must exist); or
Git’s index aka staging area.

Because git rm is about removing a file or files, it only needs to know the name(s) of the file(s) to remove. Adding --cached tells git rm to remove these files only from Git’s index aka staging area.

On Pycharm, I can use git restore –staged to undo git add but on Visual Studio [I get the] error fatal: could not resolve HEAD

This error message indicates that you have no commits. That means there’s no source from which to restore the file unless you choose the existing staging area as the source. So either there’s a bug in VSCode (which is extremely likely¹), or you have not yet made your first commit (which is even more likely). Your PyCharm IDE is probably able to do things because you have made your first commit by now.

This is also what your screenshots show.

¹VSCode is ridiculously complicated and allows nearly arbitrary plug-in extensions, and judging by what I have seen here on SO, most of the extensions are positively riddled with bugs. 😀 That’s not exactly VSCode’s fault, but it’s the kind of thing that would make me think again about using VSCode, if I could stand to use IDEs for any serious work in the first place.