[prodigal_erik]

What disturbs me about that workflow is that your commits have literally never been tested because the staging area contents aren't accessible as a working copy. I for one am adamant about not littering my history with all my crap that didn't run, so I much prefer to commit the mixed work and then rewrite history to tease out and regress the independent changes. I pretty much always test and commit my workspace as-is, treating the staging area as an unfortunately visible implementation detail. It'd be easier if I could stash some but not all of my changes to get them out of my workspace temporarily, but this hasn't bugged me enough to figure out how to implement that.

[spacemanaki]

> It'd be easier if I could stash some but not all of my changes to get them out of my workspace temporarily, but this hasn't bugged me enough to figure out how to implement that.

Here, let me help you, from the examples section of `git help stash`:

"Testing partial commits You can use git stash save --keep-index when you want to make two or more commits out of the changes in the work tree, and you want to test each change before committing:

               # ... hack hack hack ...
               $ git add --patch foo            # add just first part to the index
               $ git stash save --keep-index    # save all other changes to the stash
               $ edit/build/test first part
               $ git commit -m 'First part'     # commit fully tested change"

A nice thing about Git's Swiss army knife nature: someone else has likely run into most problems you encounter, and have added the solution to Git porcelain.

[prodigal_erik]

Thanks for the very genteel RTFM. I think you've pointed that out before, I just mischaracterized the process as quarantining the changes I don't want yet rather than rescuing the changes I do and forgot the mechanics.

[philwelch]

> It'd be easier if I could stash some but not all of my changes to get them out of my workspace temporarily

It's literally called "git stash".

Aside from that, you can squash commits together after-the-fact. If it makes it any easier, you can squash a whole branch together all at once before pushing it out to other people. No one need be the wiser. The intermediate commits can just be temporary savepoints for your personal convenience.