Interactive add

The exposed staging area Git offers sometimes leads to confusion, especially when adding a file, changing it a bit, and then adding the file again to be able to commit the changes made after the first add. While it can seem a bit cumbersome to add the file after every little change, it is also a big advantage that you can stage and unstage changes. With the git add command, it's even possible to only add some changes to a file in the staging area. This comes in handy, especially if you make a lot of changes to a file and, for example, want to split the changes into bug fixes, refactoring, and features. This example will show how you can easily do this.

 

Getting ready

Again, we'll use the Git-Version-Control-Cookbook-Second-Edition_tips_and_tricks repository. Clone it and check out the interactive branch:

$ git clone https://github.com/PacktPublishing/Git-Version-Control-Cookbook-Second-Edition_tips_and_tricks.git
$ cd Git-Version-Control-Cookbook-Second-Edition_tips_and_tricks...