> You can commit a subset of changed files in most version control systems, but it isn't smart because you didn't test that state and it's relatively easy to ga

> You can commit a subset of changed files in most version control systems, but it isn't smart because you didn't test that state and it's relatively easy to garble files. The clean solution here is to stash/shelve the changes you don't want, then commit the ones you wanted. This works pretty much the same way in either VCS. > Not having the index is a very practical difference for users, because it means that you do not get any editable "staging" commits, only commits that will be on the permanent record. Use hg commit [-i], hg commit --amend [-i], and hg uncommit (with evolve) to modify the most recent commit as needed. Or, frankly, just use hg shelve [-i] to do the reverse as described above. The Git index doesn't improve upon the situation, since you still can't test the partial commit without stashing the remaining changes first. At which point you could have just done that first. In any event, the closest equivalent of Git's index in Mercurial is MQ, not hg commit -i and friends. The difference is that in Mercurial it's opt-in rather than opt-out.