Equivalent of: git reset --hard --patch?

Question

Is it possible to do equivalent of git reset --hard --patch? (as this gives me: fatal: --patch is incompatible with --{hard,mixed,soft}).

In other words, how to do git reset --patch, but have the "unstaged" changes immediately discarded? (especially for newly added files - I don't want them littering my working directory, as I have it already quite littered with other stuff... so it's hard to find the new litter to remove it by hand...)

edit: or, maybe something like "multiple staging areas", where chunks can be passed from one to another easily like with --patch?

edit2: This seems not clear from the above question, so I'll copy a disclaimer from a comment I made below: Please note I don't want to have any files which show as "new file" in "Changes to be committed" in output of git status moved to "Untracked files". And for each of them I want to be able to explicitly decide if I want to keep them or discard them permanently (i.e. delete from disk).

In still other words: I'm trying to split a commit in two, but I have some "new files" in it. Some of them I want to move into the "other half" of the commit. But I don't want to have to add them one by one from the list of "Untracked files".

edit3: again to clarify: I have numerous "Untracked files" staying around that I don't want to add to .gitignore or .git/info/exclude for one or other reason.

Answer 1

git reset --hard is meant to bring you to a clean state in essentially any situation: it works if you have staged or unstaged changes, if you have conflicts in your index, ... In these situations, a --patch option would not really make sense.

Actually, git reset --hard is usually not a good idea for the end-user: not only it discards changes, but does so in an unrecoverable way. As opposed to this, git stash keeps the changes. It can both be used for "I want to put these changes aside temporarily and I'll get them back soon" or "I know I want to discard these changes permanently, but I'll keep a backup just in case".

As you already noted, git stash has a --patch option, so it's clearly a good solution. An alternative is to use git reset --patch (without --hard) to get your index in the state you want, and then git stash --keep-index to have the work tree match the index.

If the change is large enough that you need to worry about the disk space usage, or if you just don't want to add clutter to your stash list, you can then run git stash drop to remove the stash entry.