Say I have branch and branch . In I have been doing several changes in file1, file2. But, also, I ended up doing refactoring on things that were apparently fixed, say in fileA, fileB.
Now I would like to create a different branch that isolates these changes in <my_feature> to have say <my_updates> with commits to just fileA, fileB.
Currently I have changes not staged for commit in file1, file2, fileA and fileB.
I have been reading about git cherry-pick and git apply but it involves things that are already commited.
Now that none of these changes are commited, I don't know if I should be commiting this and cherry picking or if there is a better way to handle.
To make sure the picture is clear, let's make some visual out of it:
I wanted to do:
master ------------------
\--- my_feature ----/
file1
file2
But now I have
master ------------------
my_feature ----/
file1
file2
fileA
fileB
and I want to merge this (changes in fileA, fileB) before going ahead with <my_feature>:
master ------------------
\--- my_updates ----/
fileA
fileB
So that <my_feature> will just contain the changes in file1, file2.
You could git stash, move to a new branch and then git stash pop. Then you can do further work or commit the result.
You could also create a patch by directing output of git diff into a file (git diff > changes.patch) or the clipboard (git diff | pbcopy for OS X or git diff | xclip -selection clipboard in Ubuntu). Then you can apply that patch with git apply to any other branch.