[Certhas]

gitless has the --partial flag that allows you to commit parts of files interactively.

And your workflow of gradually building up an index of (parts of) files can be achieved by partial/amendable commits. You simply iteratively/interactively add files and partial files to your latest commit until you're done. Instead of building up the index and then committing it, you just build up the commit directly.

This also means you can interact with the "in progress commit" in the same way as with all other commits.

There is no need for having an index to realize what you want.

Another minor point: Your workflow _is_ a power user workflow in my world. Out of twenty people that have reason to use git, one has use for this workflow.

It seems we roughly agree that there is a lot of scope for improving git though. I looked at magit and it looks nice. It exposes all the moving parts in a user interface. I would prefer to just have fewer moving parts, but if they are there it's sensible to make them obvious (and it puts to rest the idea that all you need to understand is that the git data structure is a DAG...)