TIL: Show Intent to add a File in git

September 4, 2019 · One min read

Christoph Beck

Head of Intergalactic Mischief

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If you add a new file to your code which you want to add to git later, you can show that intent early with git add --intent-to-add. This is quite useful when want to add new files to the index (so you don’t forget about them later), but you’re still working on them and don’t want to add the content just yet 🥳

This is what the git documentation says:

-N, --intent-to-add
    Record only the fact that the path will be added later. An entry for the path is placed in the
    index with no content. This is useful for, among other things, showing the unstaged content of
    such files with git diff and committing them with git commit -a.