Tag: help-wanted

How to download and merge commits from a remote branch on your local branch – 118

Today’s tip shows how to combine doing a Fetch and a Merge by using the Pull command.

Suppose you have some incoming commits that you’re ready to merge into your local branch. In this example, I’ve create a new file on master on GitHub and I want to bring that commit into my local master branch.

Instead of fetching to review the commits that are going to be applied, we’ll assume you’ve already looked at GitHub to see what will be merged in.

Pull incoming commits into local master branch

The result of the Pull command shows a message at the top of the Team Explorer.

Repository updated to commit ID

Viewing the history on the master branch shows the tip (the top of the branch) having the newly merged in commit from GitHub.

History for local master branch

This begs the question: Why use Fetch? Why not always do a Pull? I believe the answer is

    1. if you want to verify what commits have been downloaded
    2. if you want to know if you’ll run into any merge conflicts before doing the Pull (the merge portion of Pull). However, I’m not sure how you can know if you’re going to have any merge conflicts, if you haven’t first merged the commits somewhere. I guess you could manually review the changes. Perhaps someone reading this knows what I’m missing.





Amend using Visual Studio


Actions button in Team Explorer

Click on the Actions button and select Amend Previous Commit.

Amend Previous Commit

And you’ll get a new commit ID.

new commit ID shown in TE info bar

Amend using Command Line



  1. make changes to your file
  2. use git add to add those changes to staging




