The stage is git's killer feature to me. I'm very iterative, so I tend to change a lot of tangential things as I narrow down the best implementation of my code.

The stage is git's killer feature to me. I'm very iterative, so I tend to change a lot of tangential things as I narrow down the best implementation of my code. Knowing that I'm free to change whatever I want and only commit the parts that I've determined are good is very liberating. My workflow is basically just change whatever I want to get to my goal. When I finally get the behavior I want, stage the changes and stash the rest. Once I've verified that everything works, commit the stage and drop the stash. I don't have to think about anything not directly related to my commit. Feels like with tools like jujutsu, pijul, mercurial...I'd have a lot of manual cleanup to do _before_ committing...and then what if I accidentally clean up something I didn't realize I needed? It's gone. Whereas, with git I can just pop the stash and stage whatever piece I missed.