I think one of the first things you learn in git is the

git diff

command. This one is really important for me, because I forget exactly what I’ve changed since I last committed. But sometimes, I forget to run

git diff

before I add my files to the staging area. Whoops!

I feel like I should have figured this out sooner (that’s how learning works, right? obvious once you know it), but there is a very nice command that fixes this problem for me!

git diff --cached

show the git diff for files I’ve already staged! Huzzah! My commit messages will never be a series of “Ummmmm, I don’t remember what I just did.”