Git WIP

Sometimes I’m working on a branch and I won’t finish what I’m working on for some reason. Maybe there’s a more urgent thing that needs to be done, or I’m just messing around and looking at different ways to solve a problem, and I want to abandon this and work on something else.

In this case I want to stash my changes, for a long period of time, and I want to attach them to a specific branch.

I’ve been using a solution that works really well for my workflow:

[alias]
  wip = !"git add .; git commit -nm 'WIP: This is a work in progress commit'"
  unwip = !"if git log -1 --pretty=%B | grep 'WIP'; then git reset HEAD~1; else echo 'No WIP commit was found'; fi"

Simply do git wip to add all your changes to branch under a WIP commit.

To revert, do git unwip, which has a safeguard to prevent you from accidentally unwipping normal commits.