How do you usually restore a deleted file?

[iamFIREcracker]

Here is what I did, today, but was curious to see if there were a better way of doing it.

1. Find the commit which deleted the file (either via :Gclog ..., or with :G), and open it (<CR>, gO, O, you name it)

2. Copy the commit id with y<C-G>

3. Find the chunck where the file got deleted, and then open the deleted file by pressing <CR> on its path

4. :Ge to edit the same file in work tree

5. :Gread incantation (i.e., :Gread <C-R>0^:%) to finally load the content of the deleted file

   • <C-R>0 loads the commit ID from step 3
   • ^ is to select the ancestor
   • :% is to load the content of the file (without it, it would dump the commit message into the buffer)

Now, I can live with this: it's not like I am spending my day restoring files; but I was wondering if there wasn't a simpler way of doing this; maybe something that did not require step 2?

[iamFIREcracker]

Turns out one could use the ! fugitive object for this!

From the help fugitive-object's help:

!               The commit owning the current file
!:Makefile      The file named Makefile in the commit owning the current file

I guess I can get rid of step 2, and change 5 to: :Gread !^:%.

[tpope]

If you're in a work-tree file, ! is just an alias for @ aka HEAD. So you can also do :Gread @^:%.

[tpope]

Alternatively, if you're already editing the file you want to restore in the history (e.g., via :Gedit @^:%), you can call :Gwrite! and it will write the contents of the current buffer to the work-tree and the index. This method makes more sense if you're already rooting around in the history looking for where to restore the file from.