workflow question

I'm still trying to figure out how to adapt my workflow to git or git to my workflow, and I've come up with yet another question or two...

I tend to work detached from our central SVN server, and I'm attracted to the fact that I can work on my laptop, commit changes as I go along, and later synchronize them back to the server.

On my current project, I am sole developer (at present) and the central SVN server serves primarly as an off-site backup and historical archive.

Enough of the setup, here are the questions...

1) I would like to make a (git) branch on which I can commit
hourly/daily/periodically as I add in a new feature (so that I can
roll back to the "Gee, I thought it was behaving yesterday -- what
does that code look like?" commit when I need to), but I don't want to
send all of the "commit as of 12:32 on Thursday" commits back to the
SVN server when I'm done.  Do I want to use a "squash" merge to merge
my changes back to the master branch before I synchronize with the
subversion server?  Or do I use the "--no-commit" option to merge?  Or
do I try something else?  The first/last time I tried this, I ended up
with a fast-forward merge back into master, which included all of my
stupid little commit messages.  I would rather one commit message that
read "Added XYZ feature".

2) When I don't fork a branch, and I don't commit until I've completed
the particular feature I'm working on, I can get a fairly good idea of
where I am and what I was doing last (which might be 5-7 days ago,
given high priority interrupts on other projects, summer vacations,
etc...) just by running a "git status".  I see that there are 7 new
files, and 2 modified files.  I know that, when I fork my branch, I
can use "git diff master" to see what's different between my branch
and the master, but then I get the diff of all of the changes as well,
which is too much information.  "git diff --name-only" and "git diff
--summary" are closer, but I can't tell what's been added vs. what's
been changed.  Any suggestions?

As an aside, is there an undocumented option to "git status" to produce a less verbose report of what's been changed and what's not checked in? Perhaps a single line per file with a one or two letter indication of the status of the file followed by the name? If not, would there be any violent objections to my submitting a patch to add such a feature?

That's enough for now.  Thanks for reading this far :-)

--wpd