Tonight I learned a basic git trick that was not immediately obvious to me, but should have been, I guess.

I've been switching my Spacemacs back to the master branch to try trouble-shoot a performance issue I'm having on the Macintosh where it just hangs occasionally. My master is tracking to Spacemacs master which is still at 0.200.13. I haven't touched it in over a year, and there are some things that I wanted from my develop branch.

I want to merge in the latest version of those few files, but not everything on the branch, so a merge is not the right operation.

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If you take look at the revision history for some of my projects on GitHub, you'll see that I have a fairly messy track-record!

A few times I have successfully used Magit's ability to interactively stage/unstage Hunks or parts of Hunks, to make my commits a bit more clean and sensible, but not always.

The real problem is: I haven't been using Branches. It's because I haven't studied how to use them effectively, and in the past they've been scary.

But for the future, and especially for my dotfiles, I'd like to be able to read through the commits and make sense of them after. Also I'd like to be sure when I'm committing that I don't make any unplanned master changes and break things.

I also tend to work by myself on these projects, but I'll often go on a tangent, or start a blog post and then put off finishing it while another, different idea is developed and maybe even published first. Ideally I should be able to track these things separately.

So I need to learn: how to do revision control workflow with branches, properly.

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