“git commit --amend” without “git add” / changing staging area

Question

After further development I need to add additional changes to previous commit.

I've made a lot of changes including from IDE, that handle file renames, creating new files, etc.

So git status shows a lot of files in staging area.

I do not want to add this files with git commit --amend --no-message .

Can I list these files as arguments to git commit --amend --no-message ? Any other possibilities without disturbing index?

I think about stashing index - but it is complicated thing to list 40 files to ignore instead 2 files for amend....

Answer 1

Most IDE reflects the staging area to real Git operations. (I'm using VS Code, and it does.) So, first unstage all files with:

git reset .

Then, set your files to be staged via git add or the IDE buttons. There should be a plus button for a file, depending on the IDE interface.

Finally, execute git commit --amend --no-message . The semantics should be same as normal commit.

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If you can't figure out how to do the things above, doing an interactive rebase to squash the commits also helps. See How to modify existing, unpushed commits?

Answer 2

After experimenting I found an easy (and obvious) solution:

$ echo x >> file1
$ echo x >> file2
$ echo y >> fileZZZ

(1)$ git add .

(2)$ git ci -m fix file1

(3)$ git commit --no-edit --amend file2

At (1) I fill index. At (2) I commit necessary files leaving all other ( file2 and fileZZZ ) in index, at (3) I add missing file2 fix leaving fileZZZ in index.

It is possible to work with Git as if there is no staging area.