git stash -> merge stashed change with current changes

Question

I made some changes to my branch and realized I forgot I had stashed some other necessary changes to said branch. What I want is a way to merge my stashed changes with the

Answer 1

As suggested by @Brandan, here's what I needed to do to get around

error: Your local changes to the following files would be overwritten by merge:
       file.txt
Please, commit your changes or stash them before you can merge.
Aborting

Follow this process:

git status  # local changes to `file`
git stash list  # further changes to `file` we want to merge
git commit -m "WIP" file
git stash pop
git commit -m "WIP2" file
git rebase -i HEAD^^  # I always use interactive rebase -- I'm sure you could do this in a single command with the simplicity of this process -- basically squash HEAD into HEAD^
# mark the second commit to squash into the first using your EDITOR
git reset HEAD^

And you'll be left with fully merged local changes to file, ready to do further work/cleanup or make a single good commit. Or, if you know the merged contents of file will be correct, you could write a fitting message and skip git reset HEAD^.

Answer 2

May be, it is not the very worst idea to merge (via difftool) from ... yes ... a branch!

> current_branch=$(git status | head -n1 | cut -d' ' -f3)
> stash_branch="$current_branch-stash-$(date +%yy%mm%dd-%Hh%M)"
> git stash branch $stash_branch
> git checkout $current_branch
> git difftool $stash_branch