In my workflow I try to use the index (staging area) and last commit efficiently. Very often I will commit something partially working with a “work in progress” commit message to tell myself that I am not done. As I work I will git commit --amend to that commit.

It may look like:

# hack hack hack
git add foo.c
git commit -m"WIP: hacking on this and that"

# hack hack hack
git add -p bar.c
git commit --amend

I have typed git commit --amend a lot. Typing it is not so bad, but this command also invokes an editor. Most of the time, I am not interested in what the editor is there for – to update the commit message.

Enter git amend:

git config --global alias.amend 'commit --amend -C HEAD'

This alias adds a git amend command that will reuse the current commit message when it amend it.

It’s the little things :)