Writing good commit messages is very important when developing a large project. It helps you and your team understand the changes you’ve made and why you made them. Oftentimes, as PhD students, we tend to work alone and not care that much about the commit messages. However, when you start working with a team, you’ll realize how important it is to write good commit messages and to stage your files properly. To me, setting up good practices and good workflows from the beginning is really important.

One command I really like is

git add -p

What is git add -p?

This command initiates an interactive staging session that allows you to selectively stage portions of a file. This is particularly useful when you’ve made changes to a file and want to commit only some of those changes.

How to use git add -p?

It’s really easy. Just type

git add -p

and then git will present you with a series of options.

For example, some that I use a lot are:

  • ‘y’ to stage this hunk
  • ‘n’ to not stage this hunk
  • ’s’ to split this hunk
  • ‘q’ to quit; do not stage this hunk or any of the remaining ones