My use of `git add` - and the explicit staging area more generally - is mostly a workaround for the fact that the repos I work with have checked-in dev setup scripts, IntelliJ/Visual Studio/Xcode/VS Code configurations, and so on.
My own setup differs in slight ways from what those scripts expect, and even where they match I like to do my own customizations. I don't want to commit those changes, and staging makes it easy to not do that MOST of the time. The rest of the time, it's a `git stash` dance, which I sometimes screw up and lose the customizations.
I've tried to manage the configurations a different way, such as by having a private branch with my own settings checked in, but that doesn't usually work out. I'm aware that the REAL problem is that my coworkers have checked in those settings to begin with, but I would counter-argue that the REAL REAL problem is that those tools don't have a good way to combine "settings that I override or that only I care about" and "settings that have project-wide defaults but are safe for me to override." (Visual Studio gets it close to right with its .xyzproj and .xyzproj.user files, but VS Code's single .vscode/ folder breaks down in shared repos.)
If you feel like fucking around with new source control tools, jj (jujutsu)'s megamerge workflow is really good at this.
(If you're not interested, feel free to skip the rest of this).
I have each in process workstream in a commit that is merged at the top level, then I have a new wip commit off of that where stuff I'm typing right now sits.
It's easy to split/squash/absorb parts of that commit into the right destination, but also to introduce parents of the megamerge that will never get merged.
My own setup differs in slight ways from what those scripts expect, and even where they match I like to do my own customizations. I don't want to commit those changes, and staging makes it easy to not do that MOST of the time. The rest of the time, it's a `git stash` dance, which I sometimes screw up and lose the customizations.
I've tried to manage the configurations a different way, such as by having a private branch with my own settings checked in, but that doesn't usually work out. I'm aware that the REAL problem is that my coworkers have checked in those settings to begin with, but I would counter-argue that the REAL REAL problem is that those tools don't have a good way to combine "settings that I override or that only I care about" and "settings that have project-wide defaults but are safe for me to override." (Visual Studio gets it close to right with its .xyzproj and .xyzproj.user files, but VS Code's single .vscode/ folder breaks down in shared repos.)