Git: How do you replace your current working directory with a previous commit without branching or git revert?

Question

Is there an easy way to the following with git?

Basically I want to create a new commit at the top of my commit history that is equivalent to a previous com

Answer 1

Assuming you start from a clean worktree, you could do:

cd 
git checkout master
git checkout 49a732c -- .

When you specify a file (in this case . (the root directory of your repo)) as an argument to git checkout, the checkout will not switch branch (the repo HEAD will remain the same). It will just update the index to make that file match the version of that file from the specified commit. Since you specified the root directory of the repo, all files in the index will be updated to match the specified commit 49a732c