How to revert a "git rm -r ."?

git reset HEAD

Should do it. If you don't have any uncommitted changes that you care about, then

git reset --hard HEAD

should forcibly reset everything to your last commit. If you do have uncommitted changes, but the first command doesn't work, then save your uncommitted changes with git stash:

git stashgit reset --hard HEADgit stash pop

I git-rm'd a few files and went on making changes before my next commit when I realized I needed some of those files back. Rather than stash and reset, you can simply checkout the individual files you missed/removed if you want:

git checkout HEAD path/to/file path/to/another_file

This leaves your other uncommitted changes intact with no workarounds.

To regain some single files or folders one may use the following

git reset -- path/to/filegit checkout -- path/to/file

This will first recreate the index entries for path/to/file and recreate the file as it was in the last commit, i.e.HEAD.

Hint: one may pass a commit hash to both commands to recreate files from an older commit. See git reset --help and git checkout --help for details.