> I still don't understand what the point is of having a staging area. Nor do my coworkers who keep committing whitespace changes and machine-specific configu

> I still don't understand what the point is of having a staging area. Nor do my coworkers who keep committing whitespace changes and machine-specific configuration changes unrelated to the tasks at hand. For a more serious answer: I find it extremely useful to be able to control what goes exactly into each commit. Sometimes I refactor more than one part of the code at the same time. If one part passes tests and another one doesn't, I can commit just the one that does. If I spot an issue in one part of the codebase and I add a TODO or FIXME in a comment, or if add some logging, or some other inconsequential change, I can leave them in the working copy for later while still adding "atomic" changes to the repo. But by far the most use I get out of it is as a last chance of reviewing the code I just wrote, or as a way of checking the results of an automatic merge before the actual merged commit gets written.