8.8 Wip Modes

Git keeps committed changes around long enough for users to recover changes they have accidentally deleted. It does so by not garbage collecting any committed but no longer referenced objects for a certain period of time, by default 30 days.

But Git does not keep track of uncommitted changes in the working tree and not even the index (the staging area). Because Magit makes it so convenient to modify uncommitted changes, it also makes it easy to shoot yourself in the foot in the process.

For that reason Magit provides a global mode that saves tracked files to work-in-progress references after or before certain actions. (At present untracked files are never saved and for technical reasons nothing is saved before the first commit has been created).

Two separate work-in-progress references are used to track the state of the index and of the working tree: refs/wip/index/<branchref> and refs/wip/wtree/<branchref>, where <branchref> is the full ref of the current branch, e.g. refs/heads/master. When the HEAD is detached then HEAD is used in place of <branchref>.

Checking out another branch (or detaching HEAD) causes the use of different wip refs for subsequent changes.

User Option: magit-wip-mode

When this mode is enabled, then uncommitted changes are committed to dedicated work-in-progress refs whenever appropriate (i.e. when dataloss would be a possibility otherwise).

Setting this variable directly does not take effect; either use the Custom interface to do so or call the respective mode function.

For historic reasons this mode is implemented on top of four other magit-wip-* modes, which can also be used individually, if you want finer control over when the wip refs are updated; but that is discouraged. See Legacy Wip Modes.

To view the log for a branch and its wip refs use the commands magit-wip-log and magit-wip-log-current. You should use --graph when using these commands.

Command: magit-wip-log

This command shows the log for a branch and its wip refs. With a negative prefix argument only the worktree wip ref is shown.

The absolute numeric value of the prefix argument controls how many "branches" of each wip ref are shown. This is only relevant if the value of magit-wip-merge-branch is nil.

Command: magit-wip-log-current

This command shows the log for the current branch and its wip refs. With a negative prefix argument only the worktree wip ref is shown.

The absolute numeric value of the prefix argument controls how many "branches" of each wip ref are shown. This is only relevant if the value of magit-wip-merge-branch is nil.

X w     (magit-reset-worktree)

This command resets the working tree to some commit read from the user and defaulting to the commit at point, while keeping the HEAD and index as-is.

This can be used to restore files to the state committed to a wip ref. Note that this will discard any unstaged changes that might have existed before invoking this command (but of course only after committing that to the working tree wip ref).

Note that even if you enable magit-wip-mode this won’t give you perfect protection. The most likely scenario for losing changes despite the use of magit-wip-mode is making a change outside Emacs and then destroying it also outside Emacs. In some such a scenario, Magit, being an Emacs package, didn’t get the opportunity to keep you from shooting yourself in the foot.

When you are unsure whether Magit did commit a change to the wip refs, then you can explicitly request that all changes to all tracked files are being committed.

M-x magit-wip-commit     (magit-wip-commit)

This command commits all changes to all tracked files to the index and working tree work-in-progress refs. Like the modes described above, it does not commit untracked files, but it does check all tracked files for changes. Use this command when you suspect that the modes might have overlooked a change made outside Emacs/Magit.

User Option: magit-wip-namespace

The namespace used for work-in-progress refs. It has to end with a slash. The wip refs are named <namespace>index/<branchref> and <namespace>wtree/<branchref>. When snapshots are created while the HEAD is detached then HEAD is used in place of <branchref>.

User Option: magit-wip-mode-lighter

Mode-line lighter for magit-wip--mode.