Break a git commit into multiple smaller commits
The idea here is that you have a bunch of changes and you want to turn the various changes into commits. Some of the changes should go into one commit, some into another, perhaps some other changes into a third. A few additional changes are not ready for committing and should stay in the working tree for further work.
One way to do this is to make some git-add -p passes until one
commit-worth of changes have been staged in the index, then commit the
index, and repeat. This is the workflow I described in my blog
article my git habits.
This project, git-split-commit, will be an alternative, one I hope
is more convenient.
git-split-commit will take the current set of diffs, break it into
chunks, and write each chunk into a file in a special directory. You
will create some subdirectories and sort the chunks into the
subdirectories. When you run git-split-commit again, it will
examine the subdirectories and turn each one into a commit that
includes the changes given by just the chunk files in that directory.
If a directory contains a file called MESSAGE, that file will be
used as the log message for the commit; otherwise you will be prompted
as usual.
To discard a change, delete its patch file. To leave a change uncommitted in the working tree, leave its patch file alone.
For further thoughts and notes, see the NOTES file in the repository.