[git] Git merge without auto commit

Is it possible to do a git merge, but without a commit?

"man git merge" says this:

With --no-commit perform the merge but pretend the merge failed and do not autocommit,
to give the user a chance to inspect and further tweak the merge result before
committing.

But when I try to use git merge with the --no-commit it still auto-commits. Here's what I did:

$> ~/git/testrepo$ git checkout master
Switched to branch 'master'

$> ~/git/testrepo$ git branch
* master
  v1.0

$> ~/git/testrepo$ git merge --no-commit v1.0
Updating c0c9fd2..18fa02c
Fast-forward
 file1 |    1 +
 1 files changed, 1 insertions(+), 0 deletions(-)

$> ~/git/testrepo$ git status
# On branch master
# Your branch is ahead of 'origin/master' by 1 commit.
#
nothing to commit (working directory clean)

A subsequent git log reveals all the commits from the v1.0 branch merged into master.

You're misunderstanding the meaning of the merge here.

The --no-commit prevents the MERGE COMMIT from occuring, and that only happens when you merge two divergent branch histories; in your example that's not the case since Git indicates that it was a "fast-forward" merge and then Git only applies the commits already present on the branch sequentially.

If you only want to commit all the changes in one commit as if you typed yourself, --squash will do too

$ git merge --squash v1.0
$ git commit

When there is one commit only in the branch, I usually do

git merge branch_name --ff

I prefer this way so I don't need to remember any rare parameters.

git merge branch_name

It will then say your branch is ahead by "#" commits, you can now pop these commits off and put them into the working changes with the following:

git reset @~#

For example if after the merge it is 1 commit ahead, use:

git reset @~1

Note: On Windows, quotes are needed. (As Josh noted in comments) eg:

git reset "@~1"