Git of the day #2: git add --interactive

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When learning Git for the first time, there can be a lot of options to learn. git-add¹ has an option, --interactive or -i for short, that starts an interactive session.

The output begins with a similar summary to git status:

$ git add -i
           staged     unstaged path
  1:    unchanged        +1/-0 file.txt

Then what follows is a list of options that you can take by pressing the corresponding number or first letter of the option at the ‘What now’ prompt.

*** Commands ***
  1: [s]tatus     2: [u]pdate      3: [r]evert     4: [a]dd untracked
  5: [p]atch      6: [d]iff        7: [q]uit       8: [h]elp
What now>Code language: CSS (css)

Here’s a brief explanation of each command:

Invocation	Command	Description	Equivalent
1 or s	status	show paths with changes	git status
2 or u	update	add working tree state to the staged set of changes	git add
3 or r	revert	revert staged set of changes back to the HEAD version	git reset
4 or a	add untracked	add contents of untracked files to the staged set of changes	git add
5 or p	patch	pick hunks and update selectively	git add -p
6 or d	diff	view diff between HEAD and index	git diff
7 or q	quit	bye
8 or h	help	this

All these options are available with direct commands instead, but this interactive session makes it easy to find out about these options.

1. Running git add … in Terminal runs the git-add binary with the remaining arguments. ↩︎