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𝑓(Stoic)
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Improve git hygiene with `git add --patch`

git, vscode, dev-improvement3 min read

Git Add Patch

My experience was occasional (but never heavy) use of gitKraken to commit a certain section of code. However, most of my daily git work happens while using the VSCode Diff UI or via the CLI.

VSCode Diff-Review-Pane

I use the CLI for many tasks such as:

  • creating branches (git checkout -b)
  • switching branches (git checkout <branch name>)
  • viewing branches (git branch)
  • removing branches (git branch -D <branch name>)
  • interactive rebase (git rebase -i)
  • checkout a branch using the hub tool (hub pr checkout <pr number>)

(I put all the most common ones here just in case anyone wants to point me to the error in my ways ;-) )

So I'm not unfamiliar with the CLI but have not found it useful for file diffing. I guess I'd put myself in the category of being a very visual differ. In the past, and not necessarily with git, I have even found a tool called BeyondCompare to be so incredibly useful at diffing files, text, etc that I can't really go back to just red/green in my terminal.

Fast-forward to today when I came across a tweet from @kyleshevlin

With the intriguing hook of "becoming one of my favorite git commands", I was drawn in to explore. The deliverable of "better, atomic commits" meets the criteria for all good git hygiene improvement.

At first glance, I didn't know what -p was or the verbose command behind it (--patch). The first article I came across while searching (and there are many) was:

I'd recommend his article as it was well written and a great place to start.

Here is a general description of -p/--patch:

1-p, --patch
2Interactively choose hunks of patch between the index and the work tree and add them
3to the index. This gives the user a chance to review the difference before adding
4modified contents to the index.

As the article and others will explain, adding -p to the git add command will walk you through an interactive selection of chunks of code (instead of a committing a whole file), allowing for adding just those chunks to your next commit.

Simple enough, and I plan to integrate this much more often into my daily work. However, as this falls into the Diffing files category of my git usage, and I diff files with git inside of VSCode, I immediately started searching how to use this workflow inside the Diff UI of VSCode.

After a bit of searching, I determined this functionality is built in as the following commands:

  • git.stageSelectedRanges AND
  • git.unstageSelectedRanges

You can find them in the command menu along with the context-menu when right-clicking inside of a file. Great! Almost there...

Now I just needed a keyboard shortcut. This Stackoverflow post covered adding them as a keybinding including the right when context as well.

Adding this to your keyboard shortcuts/bindings will allow for pressing s and u while highlighting a specific line/selection that has changed and staging it for your next commit.

1{
2 "key": "s",
3 "command": "git.stageSelectedRanges",
4 "when": "isInDiffEditor && editorTextFocus"
5},
6{
7 "key": "u",
8 "command": "git.unstageSelectedRanges",
9 "when": "isInDiffEditor && editorTextFocus"
10}

I'm excited to use this new improvement for "better, more atomic commits".

Thanks Kyle, Jacob and Markus for the inspiration to kick off that process!