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Comment by atmosx | Hacker News Reader

I guess professional programmers has this sort of thing already sorted out, but it happens all to often to reach the point where my new feature is working as it should (appears to be stable), and I keep working on yet another addition on the same branch. When I commit, I feel like I should have committed at least 2 or 3 times by now.

Happens too often so I setup up this plugin from 20 to 10 and see how it goes! But thanks, the idea is really handy.

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Heh, you'd be surprised how often even moderately experienced developers make the same mistake. I've seen months-long chains of "add feature X, it's sorta stable, start adding feature Y, whoops, gotta ship, uh-oh, X isn't stable either, work for three weeks, X is now stable but Y only seems to be, managers now calling feature Z release-critical, start working on Z, gotta ship, uh-oh, Y isn't stable yet..."

and so it goes for literally months, always some feature preventing shipping, always some feature that has to be added.

Beware that trap. Branches are cheap. Use them.

I have the same "problem". I guess I'm just too focuses on fixing stuff to stop and commit. Thankfully we're alive in a time where we don't have to adapt to our tools anymore, but our tools are adapting to us.

  git add <file> -p

This lets you pick chunks of code from <file> that you'd like to stage for commit. When I feel I'm done coding for a session, I just run a `git diff` in one window, and in the other one pick chunks that contain changes that belong in one commit.

Oh good to know! I didn't knew that was possible :-) thanks for the hint. I use a cli tool called 'tig' to view difference between commits and not committed changes.

tig is (among other things) a more user-friendly tool that can replace git add -p.

We've adopted the "every feature a branch" idea from git-flow. It feels silly to make a branch that is a 3 line typo fix, but does make it nice and clean to switch between them as your working.

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