git-stash-between-branch

why stashing

Things are easily in a messy state and you want to switch branches for a bit to work on something else but don’t want to do a commit for half-done work just so you can get back to this point later. Such work-in-progress (wip) changes are for stash, not commit.

Stashing takes the dirty state of your wip content and saves it so that you can reapply at any time to any branch. The power of stash is partly because the stashed changes are free from any branch.

how to stash

Assuem you have some uncommited changes by:

git status

And you want to switch branches, before you switch branch:

git stash

You will see confirmation info like: Saved working directory and index state “WIP on master: 049d078 added the index file …” Now you recheck current status you will find the previously existing uncommited changes are gone (nothing to commit):

git status

There is a save option that’s useful to label a ‘name’ to a stash:

git stash save “Your stash message”

With save option, another useful option, almost always needed in a messy wip case, is to include untracked files:

git stash save --include-untracked

In my experience, this is likely the most used option as I don’t tend to track temporary wip files.

how to apply stash

At this point, you can easily switch branches and do work elsewhere; your changes are stored on your stack. To see which stashes you’ve stored, you can use git stash list:

git stash list

You can keep stashing changes as many times as you want to ‘stage’ your wip contents. such as:

stash@{0}: WIP on master: "Your stash message"
stash@{1}: WIP on develop: c264051 Revert ...

As shown above, two stashes were done before. And the most recent stash made is in the top. You can apply the most-recent one to your current branch by:

git stash apply

More often you want to apply stashes selectively. You can stash one by its name, such as:

git stash apply stash@{1}

You can also have uncommitted changes when you apply a stash. Git will ask you to merge conflicts if anything no longer applies cleanly.

The stash apply option won’t remove the stash from the stash list, so you can re-apply it anytime. To apply the stash and remove it from the stash list at the same, the pop option is used instead.

git stash pop stash@{0}

To get more information from your stash list, such as diff details between stash and current content:

git stash show stash@{1}

Or to get a full diff details for all stashes:

git stash show -p

Another common use case is to apply stash to a particular branch:

git stash branch <branch-name> stash@{1}

When the stashed changes are applied, by default the previously staged changes before stashing is not restaged, aka get overritten by the stash. To preserve staged changes, git stash apply can run with a --index option to tell git to try to re-apply the previously staged changes after stashing.

git stash apply --index

Or pop a stash with staged (indexed) changes re-staged:

git stash pop --index

Instead of pop a stashed change, to simply remove it, you can run git stash drop with the name of the stash to remove:

git stash drop stash@{0}