Git's stash and clean commands make it possible to test partial commits built up in the staging area pretty easily. There's even a section of the man page for s

Git's stash and clean commands make it possible to test partial commits built up in the staging area pretty easily. There's even a section of the man page for stash that's titled "Testing partial commits". I think this is essentially the flow described there: emacs foo.c # make two changes git add --patch foo.c # stage only one change git stash save --keep-index # stash changes not yet staged git clean -f # delete untracked files, like build artifacts # now the files on disk are in the same state as what you are about to commit Sure, it's more complicated than just not having a staging area, but it can be really useful, and it's really cumbersome to manually tease apart changes in the same file.