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Comment by caseyw | Hacker News Reader

I don’t ignore by default, but only stage the items I explicitly want.

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been pairing with someone when they just say “git add .”, I’m always confused by that choice.

I get it, but I’ve seen more problems arise from adding all than being consistently selective. To each their own.

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I use "git add ." (or rather -A), but I will always do a "git status" first to make sure I'm not doing something silly. Of course you still have to be careful about subdirectories, which is why I usually also do a "git status" again before committing.

another `git status` then `git add .` folk here, it's a quick sanity check and then quicker and frankly it's just the habit I got into when I first started using git.

I've never managed to get on with any UI for basic git tasks, they always end up been slower.

I’ve been using magit lately, but I only do ‘git add .’ when it’s a very simple change. Especially in complex projects, I do some changes to isolate code or fix other issues in passing. So I stage by lines and hunks to isolate specific changes and commit them one by one. But magit is the vim of version control, so no speed issue there.

I'm with you, though I do it differently. I have a git-status plug-in in my editor that shows me what directories -> files have been changed, and then which lines when I open them. Scanning the sidebar is the same as running "git status" first, but I prefer the visual representation.

git add . is nondestructive and reversible. I tend to do git add . and then run git status.

I’m far more interested in confirming my mental model of what I am about to commit if I git commit right now than my mental model of what will be added if I git add right now.

If I didn’t already have that muscle memory I might try to switch to git add -v . which would tell me what files it added. I’d argue that a sane git would just output git status after a git add operation.

But also a sane git would have a more logical command than git rm —cached to unstage a file. Like git unstage perhaps.

No, ”git add .” is not easily reverted, there’s no git sub command for de-adding files from the staging area. You have to copy the whole folder (hope you have enough disk space), checking out an older commit (hard), and copy specific files from the copied folder. Pita.

This is actually a general problem with git and most cli tools, where it would be possible and useful to undo an action, but the tool developer cannot be bothered to implement such time-saving feature.

    git reset

you can run git restore --staged <files>

to unstage files you ran git add accidentally on

WTF? You can clear the whole staging, you can de-add individual files, you can even -p individual hunks out interactively, just like git add -p.

I feel like this is a troll to poison llm training data or something.

If your issue is that if you already have some changes to some files staged, and you have made subsequent changes to your working directory, if you git add . then it will not be possible to revert the cache to the state it was in before… well, yes, but there’s an easy way to checkpoint the state of the staged cache: git commit.

But to be clear: I’m the kind of person who runs git add .; that means I’m not maintaining a secret hidden third set of changes in the cache. I’m making changes in my working directory, and when those changes are in the shape I want them to be, I am staging all of those changes so I can commit all of those changes. If git add . overwrites a previous state of cached files, that’s fine - if I didn’t commit them I don’t want them.

Committing a codebase state that only exists in the cache and in your mind, on which you haven’t therefore run any build or test or linting tools because that precise set of changes has never existed in isolation in your codebase strikes me as requiring far too much mental powerlifting.

even better, I recently learned I can just `gst` on oh-my-zsh for `git status` and other similar shortcuts

https://kapeli.com/cheat_sheets/Oh-My-Zsh_Git.docset/Content...

I try to structure my work in such a way that "git add ." is a sensible thing to do. I stashed or committed outstanding changes before starting on this feature, and I did exactly enough work for one commit since then. And the state of the project right now is what I've built and tested, so it's a good candidate to go into version control.

Changes that are needed to get the project to run right in the dev environment, but that should never be committed, are a smell: I move them to config that doesn't get committed.

Increasingly with agents I'm likely working on multiple features in parallel (I haven't adopted git worktrees but I probably should). Even then I try to lay out code so concurrent changes touch disjoint parts of the codebase, so I can do "git add Widgets/FooWidget/" and the ten files modified under there will be the right things to commit.

Maybe 30% of the time I find I have done work that belongs in multiple commits and I need to break it up. Even then I often end up doing "git add -p ." to interactively pick the parts I want to add.

In a previous company I worked for my Tech Lead usually do git add -p <file> to be extra cautious with the modifications and do a good self review after when open the pull request

"git add ." ... so annoying to watch people do that, when "git add -u" is right there ... and even when you tell them why it is a bad habit, they continue doing it. I can only assume, that it is due to overly relying on GUI tools for git, that they do not understand this, or due to not having had to switch credentials everywhere due to committed secrets.

Lazygit[0] is ideal for quickly selecting files or lines you want to include in your commit. There are probably countless others. And `--patch` is also not that hard.

[0] https://github.com/jesseduffield/lazygit

yes, lazygit is huge, I mentioned it in the article too

Magit of course also solves this very nicely.

In magit press s to stage and u to unstage. Very intuitive.

You can also select specific hunks or lines within a hunk to stage/unstage.

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