A better git stash

Jon of saintsjd recently wrote a piece on improving the git user interface. This got me thinking about one of my git peeves.

git stash needs another sub-command. Often I want to stash ALL unstaged changes, including new (not yet added) files. This is almost possible with git stash -k, except it does not stash new files, which is very important.

Enter git stash unstaged. So now I’ve stashed the unstaged changes. That is, I’ve stashed all the changes I do not want included in the next commit. I can now run my tests as I always do before I commit… That’s what you do too, right? Oops, the tests fail because I forgot to add a file, which now happens to be in the stash. At this point I do not know of a way to get my stashed changes back exactly as they were before I stashed them, that is, unstaged. It’s really bad if there are some files that are partially staged (i.e., only certain hunks were staged), because they will create conflicts if I attempt to apply the stash right now. This should be possible. There should be a way to get things back exactly as they were before I stashed them. The missing command is git stash pop unstaged, which applies all of the changes from the stash and puts them in the unstaged (off-stage? pre-stage?) area, without conflicts.

In summary:

  • git stash unstaged – stash all changes that are not currently staged, including new and removed files
  • git stash pop unstaged – pop the top stash as unstaged changes

This would greatly improve my workflow when I get over-zealous and start changing more than I want to commit at one time (happens all the time). It would make it much easier to isolate those changes into individual, logical commits.

Posted on January 30th, 2012 at 11:17 pm | Software Development

3 Responses to “A better git stash”

October 12th, 2012 at 6:10 am - scott sadler

Try this for git stash pop unstaged:

git diff -R stash@{0} | patch -s -p1 && git stash drop -q

October 16th, 2012 at 10:27 pm - daniel

Thanks, Scott. I’ll have to give that a try.

November 30th, 2012 at 9:18 am - moudy

‘git stash -u’ will stash untracked files, so I think ‘git stash -k -u’ is what you’re looking for.

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