After some clumsy keystroke, the gutter in IntelliJ is showing not only the current local changes, but also those that have already been committed to that branch.
In the following image you can see first the local changes (as desired) but also the committed changes (that I don't want to see)
How do I set it back to how it was and remove the latter while keeping the former?
I found it! I had somehow entered the "Review mode". I went to
Help
->Find action
-> type "Review" -> Review Mode
.
That did the trick.