Feature suggestion: new 'git add -i' command to discard working copy changes

It's not infrequent that I want to discard changes I've made locally to files ('git checkout file.txt') and find myself wishing that this was an action available from the 'git add --interactive' UI; it feels like it would fit in.

Does this sound like it would be useful? I might even be able to try my hand at adding it if it seems like something that might be accepted upstream and someone can point me at the places in the code to look.

Evan

Evan Driscoll <driscoll@cs.wisc.edu> writes:

Hrm, not really. "git add" is about manipulating the index and its promise is that it won't touch working tree files. And people rely on that promise.

I can see how it would be useful to have a UI that is more interactive than CLI that shows you a list of paths and lets you pick from the list to run "git checkout" on, but I think "git add" is a bad match to it.

On Tue, Dec 18, 2012 at 01:34:38PM -0800, Junio C Hamano wrote:

Yeah. We already generalized "git add -p" to "git checkout -p" (and "reset -p", etc) to do hunk selection. Nobody bothered to generalize the rest of "git add --interactive", but logically having "git checkout --interactive" (and "git reset --interactive") would make sense.

I always assumed nobody really used the full "add -i", but maybe it is because I am such a command-line snob. Evan, are you after hunk selection (like choosing "patch" from the interactive UI), or full path selection?

-Peff

On 12/18/2012 03:59 PM, Jeff King wrote:

Mostly the latter.

I have two use cases of 'add -i'. The more common one is if I kind of want -p but don't want to do it for every file. (I guess in part this is my way of substituting for not knowing all the actions during -p as well.) But I sometimes use it if I want to stage several but not all files, as it's often faster for me to just choose the files I want from the interactive add's list than it is for me to type each of the files that I want (even with tab completion) -- I'm often working in a project with unfortunately-deep paths.

What I want for my 'discard' action is more like the latter: I'd like a fast way to choose a file(s) to discard without having to type the path(s).

Maybe I should just investigate tig or another front end; that might satisfy my desire.

Evan

On Tue, Dec 18, 2012 at 04:10:34PM -0600, Evan Driscoll wrote:

That makes sense.

Yes, "tig status" will do this (use "!" to revert changes to the path).

Another trick is to stage what you want and throw away the rest, like:

  $ hack hack hack
  $ git add -i ;# now everything unstaged is garbage
  $ git checkout .
  $ test test test
  $ git commit

Of course that implies that you can separate the wheat from the chaff at that exact moment. Sometimes you are just discarding known junk to make further work or "add -i" easier.

-Peff