Re: stashing only unstaged changes?

From: Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason <avarab@gmail.com>
Date: Jun 24, 2022, 13:09 UTC
Message-ID: <220624.86tu8ai4mr.gmgdl@evledraar.gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <20220621142618.239b02cd@bigbox.attlocal.net>

On Tue, Jun 21 2022, Tim Chase wrote:

Show 30 quoted lines

> I recently had composed a commit with some `git add -p` leaving some
> portions unstaged. I wanted to stash the unstaged changes to make
> sure that the staged code ran as expected, so I did  a `git stash`
> only to find that it unstaged my staged changes and stashed
> *everything*.
>
> Using `git stash --saved` does the opposite of what I want (stashing
> the index, not the difference between the index and the working-copy)
>
> So I carefully re-`git add -p`'ed everything and tried `git stash
> --keep-index` which sounded promising (my index remained the same),
> but popping my stash ended up causing conflicts because it had
> stashed the diff of HEAD..working-copy, not INDEX..working-copy.  A
> `git stash show -p` confirmed that the stash included things that I
> had already staged.
>
> So I carefully re-`git add -p`ed everything yet again, but then got
> stuck trying to convince `stash` to save a snapshot of only the diff
> in my working directory. To work around it, I did a `git diff >
> temp.patch` to obtain the stuff I'd wanted to stash, a `git reset
> --staged` to clear out those changes, ran my code to verify
> (eventually committing it), and then applied the `temp.patch` back on
> top of my changes.  It worked, but felt convoluted.
>
> I did see the `git stash -p` option, to manually choose the inverse
> bits, but for what I was doing, it was more sensible to `git add -p`
> and try to stash the rest.
>
> So is there some option I've missed to tell `git stash` to stash only
> the delta between the uncommitted-index and the working-copy?

Is what you want equivalent to:

    # save the "git add -p"'d chunks
    git stash push --staged
    # save the "uncommitted"
    git stash push
    # pop the previously staged
    git stash pop --index stash@{1}

I.e. this (ab)uses the stash itself to juggle the two around. I don't think there's a way to do this in one step, but I'm not very familiar with git-stash.

If that is what you want (and we don't have a way to do it) perhaps we should have a a:

    git stash push --unstaged

Which could start out as an alias for the above sequence, with e.g. an optional "--include-untracked" being passed to the second "git stash push" command above.

I also found this past thread (CC'd the author, in case it helps), which seems to be asking the same question: https://lore.kernel.org/git/CAC4jX8GEg5=9BPepYLntGRG7n_84ju7rTSYO82SQyuiiff0UcQ@mail.gmail.com/