How to Undo Your Last Git Commit (But Keep the Code)

We’ve all done it — committed too early, committed to the wrong branch, or just
want to “uncommit” so we can review the changes again before redoing it properly.

The good news: Git makes this painless, and you don’t have to lose a single line
of code.

The one command

git reset --mixed HEAD~1

--mixed is the default, so this is the same thing:

git reset HEAD~1

That’s it. Your last commit is gone, but every change it contained is still sitting
in your working directory — now showing up as modified files in git status, ready
to be edited, re-staged, or re-committed.

What’s actually happening

The command does two things:

• HEAD~1 moves your branch pointer back by one commit (drops the last commit).
• --mixed keeps your files exactly as they are on disk, but unstages them,
  so they appear as M (modified) in git status.

The three flavors of reset

This is the part worth memorizing — the difference between the three modes:

Command	Commit removed?	Code kept?	Staged?
git reset --soft HEAD~1	✅ yes	✅ yes	✅ yes (staged)
git reset --mixed HEAD~1	✅ yes	✅ yes	❌ no (unstaged) ← what you wanted
git reset --hard HEAD~1	✅ yes	❌ deleted	—

• Use --soft if you want to re-commit immediately (everything stays staged).
• Use --mixed if you want to review/edit before re-committing — this is the safe default for “uncommit but keep my work.”
• Use --hard only when you genuinely want to throw the changes away. There’s no
  undo button here.

Undoing more than one commit

Just bump the number:

git reset --mixed HEAD~2   # undo the last 2 commits, keep all the code

A note if you already pushed

If the commit was already pushed to a remote, a local reset only changes your local
branch — the remote still has the commit. When you re-commit and push again, you’ll
likely need to either commit on top of the remote, or force-push to realign:

git push --force-with-lease

--force-with-lease is safer than a plain --force because it refuses to overwrite
work someone else may have pushed in the meantime.

TL;DR: git reset --mixed HEAD~1 undoes your last commit and keeps the code as
uncommitted changes. Remember --soft keeps it staged, --hard deletes it.