1 Answer. A merge commit is just like another commit, the state of your repository at a given point in time plus the history it evolved from. To avoid merge commits, you can rebase your changes before pushing them to a remote repository.

What exactly is a merge commit?

Unlike other commits, the merge commit is a commit which has multiple (generally two) parents. For instance, when a branch named feature is merged with master, a new commit is created on the branch master which has two parents, the previous head of master and the head of feature. The branches before Merge.

Can I merge without commit?

With --no-commit perform the merge and stop just before creating a merge commit, to give the user a chance to inspect and further tweak the merge result before committing. ... Thus, if you want to ensure your branch is not changed or updated by the merge command, use --no-ff with --no-commit.