In that case, you can use: `git config -global pull.rebase true`

After that, `git pull` will automatically attempt to rebase your local commits on top of new commits pulled from a remote, so you don’t even have to do it manually.

(I still do it manually, though, because I’m a little bit paranoid about my version control and prefer to do my merges/rebases explicitly, with a lot of extra testing and inspection. Though obviously that won’t work for everyone in every codebase!)

What I'd really like, is something in-between auto-rebase and ff-only: automatically try to "re-arrange" my commits and the upstream's commits so that they apply cleanly, but if there isn't a way to do that, then just refuse to do anything, rather than putting me in conflict-edit "both modified" mode.

Sounds fair, though you should be able to `git rebase --abort` when you get into that mode so it's not a huge deal. (I'm not 100% sure since I almost never use `git pull`; I almost always `git fetch`.)

I can see how a "rebase with auto-abort" would be helpful in some situations, though.

a "dirty" rebase sets $? to 1, so I think the auto-abort feature is just `git rebase foo || git rebase --abort`.