As far as I can tell, REBASE_HEAD always points to the last commit that was attempted to be applied in a rebase, not matter whether that attempt was successful or not. In other words, when you break in a rebase with "edit" or "break", REBASE_HEAD is the same as HEAD (except when you break before the first commit, in that case REBASE_HEAD is unset). I wonder whether it would make sense to set REBASE_HEAD only when applying a patch failed. That seems to be the main use case of it. The reason why I am asking this is: I'm using lazygit, which, during interactive rebases, shows a combined view of the real commits that were already applied, and the remaining commits that are yet to be applied (it gets these by parsing rebase-merge/git-rebase-todo); something like this, when I set the 2nd commit to "edit": pick 4th commit pick 3rd commit 2nd commit <-- YOU ARE HERE 1st commit This is great, but assuming that the 2nd commit conflicted, currently the display looks like this: pick 4th commit pick 3rd commit 1st commit <-- YOU ARE HERE I would like to extend this to also show a "fake entry" for the commit that conflicted, if there is one. REBASE_HEAD is perfect for this, except that I need a way to distinguish whether it was applied already or not. I currently do that by comparing it against HEAD, and only showing it when they are different. That doesn't always work though, e.g. when I amend the current "edit" commit. Any better suggestions how to work around this? -Stefan