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Comment by Wowfunhappy | Hacker News Reader

As a much newer developer, the biggest problem I have with git is that I rarely end up actually making one change at a time. I'll be working on some larger thing, and in the process I'll notice and quickly fix a smaller thing before returning to the original task. This might be a typo in a code comment, a poorly named variable, or a block of code I realize is dead.

I suspect this is the type of tendency which goes away with experience, but it makes git a lot less useful. My commits won't really tell you what changed; the most they can tell you is the primary change I was working on.

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Many of us do that, and it's not just a new developer thing. Git actually enables this, because you get to pick and choose what to add to the index (`git add`) before committing. So that little tweak you made in the unrelated function? -- no problem, just `git add` that later, and commit it under a different message. Not all SCM tools give you that kind of flexibility.

On the other hand, there's a diminishing return to placing every tiny change into a separate commit. Commit messages like "Fixed multiple small things" might make some people clutch their pearls, but sometimes you just need to get shit done and move on to solving bigger problems.

My suggestion is to consider breaking your commit into two: one for "fixed this big issue that everyone cares about", and one for "a bunch of tiny cleanup stuff that I happened to notice." (Maybe call that second one "refactoring" -- it will go over better with your audience.)

> Git actually enables this, because you get to pick and choose what to add to the index (`git add`) before committing.

That assumes the changes are in separate files though, right? I know you can do use the "-i" flag, but it's fairly labor intensive.

That kind of depends on your tooling. e.g., I use Magit (an Emacs front-end for git) which makes interactive mode really, really easy.

(But easy or not, other version control systems such as Subversion don't offer the feature at all. We kind of take Git for granted these days, but it wasn't always like that.)

A lighter weight option is the --patch flag to 'git add' and 'git commit'.

Personally I have gotten used to using `git commit --patch` for everything (even if I only have one change) just as a convenient way of reviewing the changes I am about to commit. With that, only committing part of the changes is no additional effort.

Look at `git add -i`. You can commit just part of a change to a file. So if you notice a small problem and already have a bunch of changes made, you can still make those changes, and commit them separately.

Up to you if you wanted to rebase those changes back onto main.

I don't use it often and find it's kind of painful to use, but if you're in the position where you've already saved two different things in your IDE and need to pull them apart for commit, it's a useful tool.

Have you tried using 'git commit --patch'? It makes it easy to separate out unrelated changes when committing. You can precede it with an invocation of 'git reset $HASH' to restructure your last few commits.

In general, more experienced git users aren't actually working on one commit at a time. They're just comfortable enough with editing history to make it look that way.

That is what OP was talking about: after you've done the change, make a commit with just that tiny refactoring. Once you're done and ready to review your work, you can cherry pick just that fix and move it to main / master / it's own PR. Since it is self-contained, it can be processed by itself only.

`git add -p` will take you through all the changes in your files, and let you add them selectively. I find this makes for much cleaner commits.

With the add command's interactive mode, it is often possible to selectively stage and commit individual patches in a file.

https://git-scm.com/book/en/v2/Git-Tools-Interactive-Staging

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