What is the shortest way to swap staged and unstaged changes in git?

Question

If some changes are added to the index and there are some changes that are not added to the index, how do I swap this two sets of changes?

Answer 1

For a lower-level solution, you can use a bit of plumbing to talk directly to the index:

INDEXTREE=`git write-tree` git add -A WORKTREE=`git write-tree` git checkout $INDEXTREE -- . git clean -f git read-tree $WORKTREE 

What that does is build a couple of temporary tree objects in the git store, one for the index and one for the working copy. Then, it restores the old index and checks it out into the working tree. Finally. it resets the index to the version representing the old working tree.

I haven't tested this, so I'm not sure how well it handles added files in either the index or the working tree.

Answer 2

It think that this is easiest to do with temporary commits. When you have staged and unstaged commits, you have the possibility of conflicts when trying to reorder the changes.

Make a commit with the staged changes, create a branch for later use:

git commit -m "Saved staged" git branch save-staged 

Make a commit with the unstaged changes (if the unstaged changes include new files you may need to explicitly git add them first):

git commit -a -m "Unstaged changes" 

Rebase the unstaged changes onto the original HEAD (may involve conflict resolution):

git rebase --onto HEAD^^ HEAD^ 

Rebase the staged changes onto the unstaged changes (may involve conflict resolution):

git reset --hard save-staged git rebase --onto HEAD@{1} HEAD^ 

Finally, reset the index to the (originally) unstaged changes:

git reset HEAD^ 

And move the branch pointer back to the original HEAD:

git reset --soft HEAD^ 

Removed temporary branch:

git branch -D save-staged