r/git • u/TheSaasDev • 2d ago

subcommit - commit only a subset of files/lines while preserving unrelated staged, unstaged, and untracked work

Enable HLS to view with audio, or disable this notification

Repo: https://github.com/reemus-dev/subcommit

To solve the pain of committing a subset of changes that arise from working with multiple concurrent agents and user edits. Yes, you could use worktrees, which is wonderful and has its place, but sometimes I just want life to be easier.

I have been using it for a few months now and decided to open-source it. Hope others find it useful too! Much less stressful than watching agents do all kinds of gitfoo to just commit their changes.

0 Upvotes

24% Upvoted

10 comments sorted by

19

u/me_hq 2d ago

git add -p ?

-3

u/TheSaasDev 2d ago

Definitely great in an interactive context, but not for non-interactive use and trying to commit an exact scope safely, e.g. an agent trying to commit only their changes

15

u/lego3410 2d ago

I respect your works, but honestly I feel vanilla git and worktree much easier.

-1

u/TheSaasDev 2d ago

Understandable. I really just wanted the IDE commit tool in a CLI

5

u/IrrerPolterer 2d ago

But this already exists in vanilla git... You can stage parts of a file with git add -p

8

u/IrrerPolterer 2d ago

Soooo..  git add -p? 

2

u/schmurfy2 2d ago

lazygit does that fairly well if you don't want an ide and not want to use the git cli directly.

0

u/donk8r 2d ago

You're right that -p being interactive is the actual problem, and nobody here engaged with that.

What I'd design against is that a filtered commit produces a tree that never existed on disk. Just tried it, agent A's rename committed clean and green while the worktree still had agent B calling the old name. Nobody ever ran the thing that got committed.

1

u/TheSaasDev 2d ago

Fair criticism, a filtered commit can produce a tree that differs from the current worktree, so it may not be the exact tree that was tested.

Pretty sure this applies even when using `git add -p` and the IDE's partial-commit tools.

If every agent’s commit must be independently runnable before it’s created, a separate worktree makes more sense. Personally, I find I don't have this requirement most of the time when working.

1

u/elephantdingo 1d ago

There’s the active voice, the passive voice, and the passivest voice/LLM voice.