Here’s the problem:

You’re coding, and in flow state, and you make a lot of changes to a single file.

Now you want to commit it, but because there isn’t a single atomic change you have to suck it up and write something terrible like git commit -m "Update stuff", or commit early and often which, while good practice, can be distracting.

This is where git add -p fundamentally changed my workflow, and I feel a bit silly for not knowing about it sooner.

What git add -p actually is

The long version of this Git option is --patch, which opens up an interactive mode for staging “hunks” of text. Hunks are different pieces of code/text that Git has identified in your file.

In other words, when you do git add -p <file> it doesn’t just add the file to staging. Instead, it opens it up and lets you go through different chunks of code to decide what to commit.

Using git add -p

When you first open it up, you’ll get a random assortment of characters at the bottom of your screen. The most important ones (for me) are [y, n, s, a, d].

• y accepts the hunk to be staged.
• n declines the hunk to be staged.
• s tries to split the hunk up into smaller pieces.
• a accepts the hunk and any remaining.
• d declines the hunk and any remaining.

s doesn’t always work as expected

If you have quite a small file, using git add -p sometimes doesn’t really work that great and suggests all of the code to be added. When you try to split it further with s, it doesn’t always work that well.

So keep that in mind. It’s likely better for established and larger projects than one-off scripts.

Further explorations

I’ve heard a lot of people talk about using LazyGit as a TUI frontend. From what I can tell it works by staging these individual hunks by default, essentially giving you an interface for doing git add -p on every change without having to keep re-running git add -p on the same file.

This is what I’m likely going to check out next to help me improve my workflow.

I also have been meaning to understand rebasing properly and git rebase -i to make sure that any commits I make can be maintained more easily in the future.

I hope you found this post useful.

Thanks for reading!