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Comment by oneandoneis2 | Hacker News Reader

Far better:

git commit -a -m 'Work in progress'

Switch to other branch, do work on it. When you come back to the branch,

git reset --soft HEAD^

It's far less volatile than stash, and far better at keeping WIP in the right place when things get so hectic that you have abandoned work on more than one branch.

Stash is only really safe to use for very short-lived uses, such as "stash/pull/unstash"

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Yes. One example use case for stash is saving some debugging change that makes sense being applied in many branches. But yes, most articles like this seem to be written by people who are yet to fully appreciate that branches are cheap/free.

Exactly right. When you first start using Git "stash" is a revelation, but over time you use it less and less. A good rule of thumb is "When in doubt, commit.". And embrace "rebase".

Why would you recommend reset --soft ?

To get back to where you started (changes not added to the index, since you are doing commit -a) you should do `git reset --mixed HEAD~` (or drop the --mixed argument as it's the default).

I think it's because some workplaces have policies about not committing partially done code. ie. Don't break the build.

Personally, if I'm on a local branch I don't care, but I guess it might bother some people.

In git commits are done off-line, so nobody will see the commit if you don't push it.

You can clean up such work-in-progress commits before pushing by using interactive rebase.

How is this really any better/different than just giving a message to a stash?

how many times have you stashed, and in what stages of development, and when you try to apply them later, will they be in order and will they work on the codebase as it has changed? also, do you even remember you stashed, and is there a log longer than 1 line?

stash is a quick hack, and is useful as a quick hack, but commits just work better.

Still no different than branches you forget to go back to. If you want the exact same behavior, than instead of

    stash apply

use

    stash branch PickingBackUpStash

That said, the majority of my uses of stash are "git stash; git pull; git stash apply" Or, alternatively, "git stash --keep-index; build; test; commit; git stash pop"

The whole point is I am not leaving the stash for long. If I have left a stash dormant for some time, I likely just drop it. Similar with branches.

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