[pjc50]

> Sometimes you have changes that are permanent to your repo (ie local workflow), that you always want to keep locally, but never push to the remote.

I appreciate that there are times when this has to be in the middle of an otherwise committed file, but it's worth avoiding that if at all possible and putting the locally-changed bit in a different file because, as others have pointed out, this is error prone. It feels like the equivalent of keeping your important files in the recycle bin because it's easily accessible.

For 90% of git users 90% of the time, the staging area is an inconvenience that adds an extra step.