Add a file despite listed in gitignore

Not sure why I wanted this 🤷. But i came across a situation where i wanted to add a file from bin. But most cases think why you’re doing this. You most probably not need to add ignored files.

git add --force my/ignore/file.foo

Add only selected files from the a list of other unstaged files (interactively)

git add -i

Use the awesome interactive mode! It has a whole lot more features. It’s quite self explanatory but you can read more about it here!

Cherry-pick pitfalls

You know how to cherry-pick.

Here’s a gotcha you’ll need to remember when git cherry-pick A..B:

• In the “cherry-pick A..B” form, A should be older than B. If they’re the wrong order the command will silently fail.
• Also, this will not cherry-pick A, but rather everything after A up to and including B.
• To include A just type git cherry-pick A^..B

Being good at updating diff header for add --patch [e]dit

This should allow you to quickly modify the hunks to select the parts you want.

• If you remove a line that starts with + then subtract one to the new line count (last digit of the hunk’s header).
• If you remove a line that starts with - then add one to the new line count (last digit of the hunk’s header).
• Don’t remove the other lines (reference lines).

Add only all unstaged files AND ignore untracked files to commit

git add -u

This is one you may use often. I highly recommend to make this an alias.

git config --global alias.stagem 'add -u .'

Ignore files from the add and commit process

A use case i can think of is when you’ve created a temporary file on the local repo that you have no intention to push but not a point to add to the .gitignore (being the file’s nature). Just ignore it so you can safely git add --all.

• To ignore: git update-index --assume-unchanged -- <filepath>
• To un-ignore: git update-index --no-assume-unchanged -- <filepath>

This will ignore the file from showing in your add and commit status.

As this is quite the long command, i recommend getting it into an alias:

git config --global alias.ignore 'update-index --assume-unchanged --'
git config --global alias.unignore 'update-index --no-assume-unchanged --'

Git will fail (gracefully) in case it needs to modify this file in the index e.g. when merging in a commit; thus, in case the assumed-untracked file is changed upstream, you will need to handle the situation manually.