How does Git's concept of the Index improve or change your workflow?

Question

I've been trying to use Git on my personal projects for almost a month now.

I have a pretty good understanding of the basic set of commands and while its user experience isn't awesome, I still find myself liking Git more than the other VCS's I've used in the past.

However, one concept that I still don't think I have "gotten" is the real purpose of the Index. I have this feeling I'm not taking advantage of some benefit it is intended to bestow.

What is the purpose of having a staging area? Coming from SVN land, I'm so used to treating my working copy as my staging area and my snapshots for my commits being taken from this.

So, my question is:

What does this extra level of indirection give you? How has the Index improved or changed your normal workflow? Can you provide any scenarios where having the Index has allowed you to do something that would have been troublesome to do without it?

Answer 1

There're definitely times when I start working on a feature or a bug fix, and then notice a quick typo or some other tiny (perhaps one-line) thing to fix. Instead of dropping all my work, or even using git stash, I can just commit that just that tiny change via the index; all my other work is still there, but now the commit is more specific: it only shows that small fix, instead of getting buried in dozens of other lines of changes. It's made for a much cleaner history, which makes it easy to search logs for changes since they're not mixed in with other commits.

In the event of (complicated, large) merge conflicts, it's also nice to be able to add each change I make to the index, so I know what conflicts I've fixed and which ones are left to deal with.