xau.txt

Interactive Adding
Although that will work for all of your development needs
– many developers simply use -a nearly every time they commit to just automatically add everything to the index
– there is another way of adding files that makes for a more controlled and thematic set of commits.
This is called interactive adding, and it is a very powerful tool to controlling what goes into each commit.
Let’s say we add a new function to our lib/simplegit.rb file,
add a new task to our Rakefile and then add a new TODO file to our project.
Later we come back and want to commit,
but we don’t remember which files had to do with each other and we don’t just want to commit them all together
because that’s confusing for collaborators trying to review our code.
Interactive mode lets us modify our index interactively before committing.
To fire it up, type git add -i:
We can see that we have two files that are being tracked
(have been added at some point in the past)
that have been modified.
We cannot yet see our new TODO file, though.
To add that, type 4 for the add untracked option and hit Enter.
You will see all the untracked files in your working directory.
Type the numbers of the files you want to add,
or a range (i.e.: 1-5),
and hit enter twice when you’re done.
This will drop you back to the main menu.
You can then type 1 to see what your index looks like now.
You can see that the TODO file is now staged (in the index),
but the other two are not.
Let’s add the Rakefile,
but not the lib/simplegit.rb file and commit it.
To do that, we hit 2, which lists the files we can update,
type 1 and enter to add the Rakefile,
then hit enter again to go back to the main menu.
Then we hit 7 to exit and run the git commit command
The interactive shell is pretty simple and very powerful
– playing with it instead of running git add commands directly may help in understanding what’s happening,
since you can see the status of your files in the index versus the working directory more clearly.
It helps visualize that what is in your index (the staged column) is what will be committed when you run git commit.
You can also do more complicated things,
like going through all of your change patches hunk by hunk,
deciding if each hunk should be applied to the next commit or not.
This means that if you’ve made a bunch of changes to one file,
you can commit part of those changes in one commit,
and the rest in a second.
Try the patch menu option in the Interactive Adding menu to try this out.
Beware of using interactive adding if you are already used to running git commit -a.
If you run through the whole interactive add process and then run git commit -a,
it will basically ignore everything you just did and just add all modified files.
interactive add screencast
The next screencast is Interactive Add in Git,
which demonstrates how to use the git add—interactive command.
It covers all of the major features of interactive adding,
including status, update, revert, add untracked, patch and diff.
removing
For removing files from your tree,
you can simply run: git rm <filename>
This will remove that file from the index (and thus from the next commit) as well as from your working directory.
On your next commit, the tree that commit points to will simply not contain that file anymore.