Android Studio – How to make a commit that reverts the state of 5 commits before?

To create a single commit that reverts the previous five commits:

(NOTE: user michid’s approach to the "reverting" portion of your question is quite a bit more succinct and streamlined than my own solution; I’d recommend reviewing it as a better alternative).

1. You can see the diff between your current commit and a specific commit (say, the commit five commits preceding) by doing git diff <the_hash_for_that_specific_commit>)
2. You can push that diff out to a patch file by doing git diff <the_hash_for_that_specific_commit> > mypatch.patch
3. You can apply the inverse of that patch file, effective reverting it, by doing git apply -R mypatch.patch
4. You could then verify your changes are as expected, run rm mypatch.patch to get it out of your working directory, then add all changes and commit

There are other ways to do this as well, but I think this is a relatively quick approach. However, others may provide easier or faster alternatives.

You also stated that you might want to combine the previous five commits into their own single commit first before you do the above approach. There are two ways you could go about that I can think of:

To combine five commits into a single commit

First approach– git reset

1. You can soft reset your head to five commits previous with git reset --soft HEAD~5.
2. You can then stage all current changes and make a new commit with the message stating that you are combining them into a single commit
3. You’ll need to force push to override your remote because you’ve changed history (unless you want to put it on its own branch)

Second approach– git rebase -i

1. You can rebase your changes interactively and squash the commits into a single commit. Using git rebase -i <the_branch_you_are_already_branched_off_of> would work, but there might be a cleaner way to identify a specific commit.
2. In the file that loads in the buffer, change the commits you want to squash from pick to squash
3. Save and quit, and the rebase will continue and squash the commits you marked for squashing.

You might want to add a rescue tag or create a new branch to experiment with this, so you don’t accidentally bork your branch or lose any work.

Also, keep in mind that if you first combine the five commits you want to revert into a single commit, you’d want to make sure you targeted the new single commit for a revert. That said, if you combine them all into a single commit first, then it would probably be easier to just do git revert <the_new_single_combined_commit> to revert it.