Stashing & Cherry-pick

Two everyday tools that don’t fit the merge/rebase story. Stash parks uncommitted edits aside so you can switch context with a clean tree. Cherry-pick copies one specific commit onto your current branch. Flip between the two demos below.

Stash: shelve work in progress

You’re halfway through an edit when an urgent fix lands. You don’t want to commit half-finished work, but Git won’t let you switch branches with a dirty tree. So shelve it:

git stash push -m "wip navbar"   # save tracked changes, clean the working tree
git stash list                   # stash@{0}: On main: wip navbar
# ... do the urgent thing, switch branches, pull ...
git stash pop                    # reapply the changes and drop the entry

pop applies the top stash and removes it; git stash apply reapplies but keeps the entry so you can use it again. Use --include-untracked to stash new files too. The stash is a small stack: the most recent push is stash@{0}.

Cherry-pick: copy one commit

Sometimes a single commit on another branch — a bug fix, say — needs to land on main now, without bringing the rest of that branch along. git cherry-pick takes that one commit’s change and applies it as a new commit on your current branch.

git switch main
git cherry-pick f1               # apply f1's change here as a new commit f1'
git cherry-pick a1b2c3..d4e5f6   # a range (exclusive of the first)

Like a rebase, the copy gets a new hash (f1 becomes f1') because it has a different parent — the original commit on the source branch is left untouched.

When to use which

• Reach for stash when the work isn’t ready to commit and you need a clean tree for a moment. (If it is ready, a throwaway commit on a branch is often clearer.)
• Reach for cherry-pick to port a finished commit to another line — for example backporting a hotfix from main to a release branch.

Both can hit conflicts (a stash that no longer applies cleanly, or a cherry-pick whose context changed). Resolve them like a merge: edit, git add, then git cherry-pick --continue or re-run git stash pop.

Takeaways

• git stash push shelves uncommitted changes and cleans the working tree; pop reapplies and drops them, apply keeps the entry.
• The stash is a stack — the latest entry is stash@{0}.
• git cherry-pick <commit> copies one commit onto the current branch as a new commit with a new hash.
• Cherry-pick is ideal for backporting a single fix without merging a whole branch.

References

• Pro Git — Stashing and Cleaning
• git stash documentation
• git cherry-pick documentation