Git merge without auto commit

Note the output while doing the merge - it is saying Fast Forward

In such situations, you want to do:

git merge <name-of-branch> --no-commit --no-ff

Important: If you do it this way, then you are not able to do any changes to the files in the staging area e.g. you can't remove/add files or make any changes to the files.

If you want to merge the changes and then commit as if you had manually typed all of the changes you merged in (as opposed to a traditional merge) you need to run rm .git/MERGE_HEAD afterward, which will force git to forget that the merge happened.

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.

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"

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