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Comment by erik_seaberg | Hacker News Reader

I stash half-baked work to keep it separate from quality commits. When I come back to the stash, I may or may not like where it was going and decide to build on it.

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Stashing always makes me nervous.

For some reason it feels ephemeral and I worry that I’ll lose the stashed changes like when you accidentally overwrote the copy/paste clipboard

Yes, I generally don't use it much, because it forces me to remember that I have stashed work.

I used to feel this way because I lost work to `git stash pop` in the past, but there is now a nice feature where if you `git stash pop` and it doesn't cleanly applies, git keeps the stash and I use it more often now.

That said for me the stash is usually used either for temporary stuff (eg taking my current work to another branch) or for things that might be useful to reference later but I will rewrite differently anyways; stuff I want to keep goes into a WIP commit.

Committing everything to a new (temporary) branch, and returning to your current branch, costs nothing and saves the headache of stash's weirdness.

Git stash is indeed more dangerous than branching. Stashes don’t go into the reflog, and so you lose the primary safety net that git offers. I’ve watched people get into a bad state with stash and end up losing work. The stash documentation says “If you mistakenly drop or clear stash entries, they cannot be recovered through the normal safety mechanisms. However, you can try the following incantation to get a list of stash entries that are still in your repository, but not reachable any more: <git fsck ...>” https://git-scm.com/docs/git-stash

I know stash feels easier to a lot of people, and that’s a valid reason, but it’s really no more typing or thinking to use branches instead, it just might require changing habits.

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