I never ever use commit -a these days, but as a newbie I did. These days, my go-tos are indeed add (-p) and/or commit -vp, so as far as the staging area goes, i

I never ever use commit -a these days, but as a newbie I did. These days, my go-tos are indeed add (-p) and/or commit -vp, so as far as the staging area goes, it become rather essential to me. Not having a staging area (or using git add . && git commit -a to bypass it) has it's drawbacks too; I think most of the "garbage" files like "main.o" and ".test.py.swp", and secret API keys in public repos, can be explained that way. To me, the answer is not abandoning the staging area, but improving the UI for handling it and/or directing users that don't want to deal with the git UI to things like GitUp. The git UI is horrible in a lot of places, admittedly. Even now, considering myself an advanced user, my workflow still is "git branch ... uhmmm... ^H^H... git checkout -b topic". Fixing the (most annoying issues of the) UI might require some breaking changes sometimes, but so be it.