An easy (ish) option here is to use autosquashing [1], which lets you create individual commits (saving your work - yay!) and then eventually clean em up into a single commit!

Eg

    git commit -am “Starting work on this important feature”
    
    # make some changes
    git add . && git commit —-squash “I made a change” HEAD

Then once you’re all done, you can do an auto squash interactive rebase and combine them all into your original change commit.

You can also use `git reset —-soft $BRANCH_OR_COMITTISH` to go back to an earlier commit but leave all changes (except maybe new files? Sigh) staged.

You also might check out `git reflog` to find commits you might’ve orphaned.

[1] https://thoughtbot.com/blog/autosquashing-git-commits