Introduction

When working with Git, version control becomes an essential part of a developer’s daily workflow.

One of the most important stages in this process is the staging area, which is a temporary area where changes are prepared before committing them.

Understanding how to view, manage, and interact with these staged changes can significantly improve your ability to track and control your code modifications.

Context

Imagine you're working on a project, making changes to multiple files. You may want to break these changes into smaller, more logical commits to keep your project history organized.

Perhaps you’ve fixed a bug in one file and added a new feature in another. Before committing, it's crucial to review exactly what has been staged. This is where viewing the staged changes comes in handy.

Importance

By reviewing staged changes, you can:

• Ensure you're only committing the changes you intend to.
• Catch unintended edits or debug code that might have been staged by mistake.
• Create well-organized commits that make your project history easier to understand and maintain.

In short, being able to review and understand what’s in the staged section allows you to fine-tune your commits, leading to cleaner, more manageable version control.

Solution

Pattern

git diff --staged <file>

Replace with the path to the file you want to see the changes for.

In my case, I want to check the db/schema.rb file, it'd be this way:

git diff --staged db/schema.rb

Output

Done