Git invert staging area

Question

I have got changes in my staging area, and others not staged yet (some files have changes both in and out the staging area). I would like to invert the content of the staging area and the changes which are not staged. Does a shortcut exist in order to do that, without doing more complex actions like local side-branch commits, or diffs, or stashes [etc.]? Thanks.

Answer 1

Here’s how I do it:

1. Commit the index to a temporary commit
2. Commit the remainder to a secondary temporary commit
3. Switch the order of the commits with interactive rebase
4. Mixed reset
5. Soft reset

It can be typed out manually pretty fast, especially if you use Vim for commit messages:

git commit -m tmp1
git add . # optionally with `git add -u` if there are deletions
git commit -m tmp2
git rebase -i HEAD~2 # swap the order of the commits; `ddp:wq` in vi
git reset HEAD~1
git reset HEAD~1 --soft

Answer 2

There’s probably more than one way to do this, but I think I would take this approach – there’s currently no pre-built shortcut to this, but you could pretty easily write your own script to follow this process:

1. Generate a patch for the stuff that is currently in your working directory but not in your index yet (things you haven’t done git add for)

   git diff-files -p > /tmp/unstaged.patch
   

2. Generate a patch for what you’ve already added to the index against your current HEAD

   git diff-index --cached -p HEAD > /tmp/staged.patch
   

3. Reset your index and working directory to your HEAD

   git reset --hard HEAD
   

4. Apply your unstaged patch to both your working directory and your index, resulting in those changes being staged

   git apply --index /tmp/unstaged.patch
   

5. Apply your staged patch against only your working directory

   git apply /tmp/staged.patch
   

Depending on the exact nature of your changes, steps 4 and/or 5 may result in some merge conflicts that you need to resolve by hand, but I’m not sure there’s a clean way to completely avoid that possibility.

You could probably use git stash to accomplish steps 1 and 4 instead of the above commands, but I’m not sure that would really gain you anything…

Also, you may want to review the man pages for the git diff-* and git apply commands first to see if there are other options that might make sense for you to use.