But you do have the op log, giving you a full copy of the log (incl. the contents of the workspace) at every operation, so you can get out of such mistakes with

But you do have the op log, giving you a full copy of the log (incl. the contents of the workspace) at every operation, so you can get out of such mistakes with some finagling. You can choose to have a workflow where you're never directly editing any commit to "gain back autonomy" of the working copy; and if you really want to, with some scripting, you can even emulate a staging area with a specially-formatted commit below the working copy commit.