¬ just serendipity 🍀 (not just serendipity)

Now I am becoming one of the snobs™ with the first sentence in the following paragraph. Here we go.

I had Claude Code¹ write me a pair of git utilities: git freeze and git thaw.

First of all: “to thaw” means “to defrost”:

To change from a frozen solid to a liquid by gradual warming.

Perhaps git unfreeze would have been more intuitive, let’s leave the bikeshedding to another day though.

What should these utilities do? They are inspired by the ones with the same name in Chromium depot_tools. Direct link:

git-freeze(1) allows you to put the current branch in ‘suspended animation’ by committing your changes to a specially-named commit on the top of your current branch. When you come back to your branch later, you can just run git-thaw(1) to get your work-in-progress changes back to what they were.

Installing depot_tools(7) just to get these two utilities is too bloated though. The security software at work flagged it as malware². And they didn’t even bother to package it for Linux distributions in the first place.

git-freeze #

#!/bin/sh
#
# git-freeze - Stage all files and create a git-freeze commit

set -e

# Check if we're inside a git repository
if [ "$(git rev-parse --is-inside-work-tree 2>/dev/null)" != "true" ]; then
  echo "Error: Not in a git repository"
  exit 1
fi

# Stage all changes (tracked and untracked)
git add -A

# Create a commit with the freeze message
git commit -m "git-freeze" -n

echo "Git freeze created successfully"

git-thaw #

#!/bin/sh
#
# git-thaw - Undo a git-freeze operation

set -e

# Check if we're inside a git repository
if [ "$(git rev-parse --is-inside-work-tree 2>/dev/null)" != "true" ]; then
  echo "Error: Not in a git repository"
  exit 1
fi

# Check if there's at least one commit
if ! git rev-parse --verify HEAD >/dev/null 2>&1; then
  echo "Error: No commits yet"
  exit 1
fi

# Check if the last commit is a git-freeze commit
if ! git log -n 1 --pretty=%B | grep -q "^git-freeze$"; then
  echo "Error: Last commit is not a git-freeze commit"
  exit 1
fi

# Undo the git-freeze commit
if git rev-parse --verify HEAD^ >/dev/null 2>&1; then
  # If there's a parent commit, reset to it
  git reset "HEAD^"
else
  # If it's the initial commit, delete the reference and unstage everything
  git update-ref -d HEAD
  git restore --staged .
fi

echo "Git freeze thawed successfully"

Post-AI cleanup #

The only change I had to make was to add -n to git commit in git-freeze so that pre-commit hooks would be skipped upon freeze.

Usage #

• Within an existing git repository, do some work in a custom branch.

• Decide that something else more important and/or urgent needs your attention. Let go of git worktrees in this instance.

• git freeze

• Switch to a new branch. Do whatever. Done.

• git checkout <your previous branch>

• git thaw

• Resume your previous work. Profit.

Edit(2025-03-20): A friend asked that is the difference between git freeze and git stash. The main difference is that git stash does not handle files not yet tracked by git, whereas git freeze does. I think of freeze as the equivalent of completely clearing up my physical desk of all objects so that I can focus on something else.