In some cases (all my usecases, but perhaps yours are different) the staging area can be replaced by some combination of "hg commit --amend" and "hg commit --in

In some cases (all my usecases, but perhaps yours are different) the staging area can be replaced by some combination of "hg commit --amend" and "hg commit --interactive" - or in older versions "hg rollback" and "hg record".