Have you ever been in a situation where you are constantly using a tool and you feel like it misses an important feature for you?
Well a couple of days ago I felt like you with Git but not anymore thanks to
git add --patch!
I constantly use Git. It offers so many essential features that I use it for everything:
- A new project? Git
- A new report? Git
- A new presentation? Git
- A new blog post? Git
- Some (non-binary) files you want to share with a friend? Git
- Some dot-files you want to keep online? Git
That is to say that without Git, my life would be really sad :(
My problem
I have a bad habit when I code though.
I am really fond of the PEP8 because it offers really nice rules which give good looking code and make reviews way easier. Because of that, I really try to be constant when following these rules and when I see a line that break one of them, I can't stop myself to fix it.
This means that I often have several things in one commit (new code plus pep8
fixes). I know that I should not since a commit should only deal with one and
only one thing.
This article nicely explain how a commit should be:
http://dev.solita.fi/2013/07/04/whats-in-a-good-commit.html.
But until a couple of days before, I never figured out how to avoid this because I did not think that it was possible to partially commit a file with Git (and I should be ashamed because it was obvious that this feature had to exist!).
Partial commit with git --patch
When reading the Git man page of the add command (for some unrelated
reasons), I stumbled onto this entry:
NAME git-add - Add file contents to the index . . . OPTIONS . . . -p, --patch Interactively choose hunks of patch between the index and the work tree and add them to the index. This gives the user a chance to review the difference before adding modified contents to the index. This effectively runs add --interactive, but bypasses the initial command menu and directly jumps to the patch subcommand. See “Interactive mode” for details.