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Comment by Sourya | Hacker News Reader

Great pointers. However, I have found that even though quite a few people know this, it takes special effort to enforce it. For example, the single-purpose commits. My commits often tend to get a bit large, and include more than one "unit" of work, even though I know the best practices. Any pointers on how to avoid that?

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It is not ideal, but ... Get a GUI and pick out lines and files and multi-commit your changes.

`git add --interactive` can be a great tool to learn in this case: https://git-scm.com/book/en/v2/Git-Tools-Interactive-Staging

In particular, the ability to only stage specific "hunks" at a time (interactive "patch" in the nomenclature of git) can make it possible to "untangle" multiple changes in your working directory into separate commits.

Didn't know about that. Thank you.

YMMV, but when I'm working on a feature branch that can take some time, I try to break it into pieces to merge into master often. One way to think about this is breaking away from the compulsion to commit the entire thing together in a branch. So I have `feat-x-part-1`, `feat-x-part-2` and so on.

It's important to resist the urge to do push things only on perfection. It works for me.

I try to emphasize that commits should not be thought of as "save points," which seems to be a seductive way to think of them, but as "undo points."

That is a good way to think. Thanks.

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