Not a direct answer, but I’ve really been liking jj. You can use it as a friendlier git frontend. It has fewer possible states (for example there are no revert-in-progress, rebase-in-progress, etc., or detached head states); and there is an undo command that really does undo any operation.

Happy for you that you fixed it. For future reference, keep this site handy to get help with most git issues:

https://ohshitgit.com/

git revert does not go back to that commit, it takes the changes that are in that commit and tries to create a new set of changes that are the opposite, i.e. undo the changes of that specific commit.

You could have known that by reading the official documentation of that command, which says essentially the same thing: “Given one or more existing commits, revert the changes that the related patches introduce, and record some new commits that record them.” https://git-scm.com/docs/git-revert

Now, if you look at the documentation of git reset, it says “changes which commit HEAD points to. This makes it possible to undo various Git operations, for example commit, merge, rebase, and pull.” i.e. this does go back to that commit.

Since revert tries to create new changes, it’s of course possible to get conflicts, since you probably changed a bunch since then. If you wanted git revert to work in this case, instead of reverting the commit “you want to go to”, you could have reverted all commits since then instead.

So in English, what you did was “try to remove the specific changes within the commit I’m giving you”(git revert) instead of “go back to the commit I’m giving you” (git reset). Next time, try not to get mad and just do a web search, all of those results mention git reset or reverting all commits since then.

It’s hard to say what the issue is since we are lacking some context. Have you made changes and commits after the commit you are trying to revert, or was that commit the most recent commit in the history?

Same with the fixes you mention, what exactly did you do to fix the merge conflict? Did you manually fix the files with the conflicts? Since you mention being a beginner with git, a common mistake would be not actually going into the files and resolving the conflicts, and just immediately doing git add/rm on the conflicting files.

I’m happy to walk you through the process if you could give a few more details, git can be complicated when you’re a beginner :)

I type ‘git status’, fix the error, then commit and push again.

Did you git add the modified file subsequent to changing it, as the git message says?