Git‘s great! But it’s difficult to learn (it was for me, anyway) — especially the index, which unlike the power-user features, comes up in day-to-day operation.
Here’s my path to enlightment, and how I ended up using the index in my particular workflow. There are other workflows, but this one is mine.
What this isn’t: a Git tutorial. It doesn’t tell you how to set up git, or use it. I don’t cover branches, or merging, or tags, or blobs. There are dozens of really great articles about Git on the web; here are some. What’s here are just some pictures that aren’t about branches or blobs, that I wished I’d been able to look at six months ago when I was trying to figure this stuff out; I still haven’t seen them elsewhere, so here they are now.