[btown]

For those who want a GUI around this on Mac, https://rowanj.github.io/gitx/ is an incredible secret weapon. You can swipe over a bunch of lines or let the software identify a whole span of contiguous changed lines, click a button, and see just those changes move over from your unstaged to staged changes, then commit exactly what you want.

A lot of times people don't even understand how powerful the staging area is; they're just used to saying git add && git commit without realizing that it can be an incredible way to take a day of chaotic fixes and turn it into a set of commits you can be proud of!

It also provides an incredible tree view of commit parentage, perfect for when you need to instantly understand what happened with this weird merge/rebase that broke things, and to screenshare it to teach colleagues who might not have developed an internal understanding of the tree structure that Git is based on.

The software is now 9 years old and abandoned, but I've used this specific fork at least weekly - often daily - for every one of those years, across Intel and M1 Macs, and it's never let me down!

[jonas-w]

According to this issue[0] there is a newer and maintained version of gitx.

[0] https://github.com/rowanj/gitx/issues/481

[noloblo]

https://github.com/gitx/gitx/releases my daily driver in mac

[btown]

Huh, it was just accepted as the mainline fork in Homebrew last week! Been trying it and it seems to have all the features that the rowanj fork had! https://github.com/Homebrew/homebrew-cask/pull/141659

[stdohm]

Been using GitX for many years . Happy to learn there’s a new fork. Thanks!

[aldanor]

There's decent well maintained git ui clients for Mac, eg Fork

[iamcreasy]

Can you briefly explain what you meant by staging area is powerful?

[Rushsick]

I assume it’s the fact that staging changes takes them out of your working tree. From there, a lot of git operations (diff, restore) will not include or modify the staged changes. This can help reason about logical chunks of code within a commit