Managing the Uncommitted Changes

This chapter will teach you some techniques to manage and edit your uncommitted changes so you can prepare commits with more precision. We’ll assume you’re already familiar with staging and unstaging files (see Making a Commit).

Staging and discarding individual hunks or lines

Sometimes, you might be ready to commit specific parts of a file—but you might still be working on other parts of that file.

Fortunately, you don’t have to stage the entire file every time you want to make a commit. The Diff View lets you stage small pieces of code in a file:

• You can stage a single hunk without staging the full file.

• You can even stage individual lines if a hunk isn’t granular enough.

Hand-picked lines ready to be staged in the Diff View.

Stashing changes

If your working directory contains changes that you’re not ready to commit yet, you can stash them. Stashing safely tucks away your changes to a stash, then it restores the affected files to their unchanged state. When you’re ready to resume working on the stashed changes, you can apply the stash back to your working directory.

This is handy when you want to reset your working directory to a clean slate without losing work in progress.

To create a stash, go to Repo ‣ Stash Changes; or, select some files in the File List, right-click and choose Stash Changes. This opens the “New Stash” dialog where you can customize the contents of the stash before confirming:

The New Stash dialog.

Fields in the New Stash dialog

Item	Description
Optional stash message	Describe the contents of your stash here. Or not—it’s up to you. Stashes are meant to be temporary, so this message is optional.
Retain stashed changes in working directory	Unticked by default, since the most common use case for stashes is to set aside some work in progress and clean up your working directory. Tick this if you want to stash the changes and keep them in your working directory anyway.
Files to stash	Select the files to include in the stash. Unticked files will not be part of the stash and will remain in your working directory.

Your new stash appears in the Sidebar’s Stashes section. To restore a stash to your working directory, right-click on it in the Sidebar and choose Apply.

Warning

If you stash a file that contains both staged and unstaged changes, those will be “flattened” in the stash.

Note

Stashes are only saved locally on your machine. They cannot be shared with others (unlike “shelves” in Perforce).

Tip

Press Ctrl Alt S to create a new stash.

Rescuing changes that you discarded by mistake

Did you mistakenly  Discard some change that you actually meant to keep?

Don’t panic—GitFourchette backs up the last 250 discarded changes by default. Go to Help ‣ Open Trash and your system’s file manager will reveal the trash folder.

In the trash, discarded changes are stored as .patch files that you can apply to your working directory. To do so, drag-and-drop a patch file from your file manager to GitFourchette’s main window.

Applying the patch might fail if your working directory has evolved too much. In this case, try applying the patch with git apply (unfortunately, GitFourchette’s patcher is a bit brittle for now and vanilla git apply is more robust).

Note

You can customize how many files to keep in the trash in Settings ‣ Trash.

File List context menu (in Uncommitted Changes)

The Stage/Unstage/Discard buttons around the file lists should cover most of your basic staging needs.

Right-click on a file in one of the File Lists to open a context menu with advanced operations:

Actions in the File List context menu (from Uncommitted Changes)

Action	Description
Stage File	Stage all changes in the selected file.
Unstage File	Unstage all changes in the selected file.
Discard Changes	Discard the changes in the selected files. Your working copy of the file will be identical to the state of the file on the HEAD commit.
Stash Changes	Save the changes in the selected file to a “stash”, then (optionally) revert the file to its unmodified state. See Stashing changes.
Revert Mode Change	If this file’s mode has changed (most commonly, the executable bit “+x”), you can use this command to restore the previous mode.
Open Diff In…	Open this diff in an external program. Set up the external diff tool in Settings ‣ External Tools.
Export Diff As Patch	Save this change as a “unified diff” patch file.
Edit In…	Edit the working copy of this file in an external program. Set up the external editor in Settings ‣ External Tools.
Edit HEAD Version In…	View the “unmodified” revision of this file (as of the HEAD commit) in an external program. Set up the external editor in Settings ‣ External Tools.
Open Folder	Reveal this file in your system’s file manager.
Copy Path	Copy the absolute path to this file to the clipboard.