Git is great, it's true. I don't wanna enhance this scm but introduce a little tip. In git, local branches are cheap, thus a common work flow is to create branches for everything. But you cannot switch from one branch to another if there are some modifications on your code and the first thing you does when a colleague ask you to test quickly something is to stash your work and do a checkout. The problem appears when you come back to your original branch two days later (because this silly bug was hard to fix) and you've forgotten that there is something in the stash list !

The tip of the day is a post-checkout's hook script that will show stashes pending to current branch after a checkout. Here I used a hook script because stashes are implemented by a bash script, so there is no API to properly access in C language. Plus, a modification in internals git code must be maintained by hand.

The first thing is to create a template repository. As described in this question on stack overflow, we'll create a global hook directory in our home, so every git repository will have access to it :

git config --global init.templatedir '~/.git_template'
mkdir -p ~/.git_template/hooks
touch ~/.git_template/hooks/post-checkout
chmod a+x ~/.git_template/hooks/post-checkout

Then you can edit post-checkout with :

#!/bin/sh
#
# Git post checkout hook
# Parameters   
#
cur_branch=`git branch | grep '\*' | awk '{print $2}'`
git stash list | GREP_OPTIONS="" \grep "[oO]n $cur_branch:"

Now after each "git checkout" you'll be noticed if there are pending stashes in the current branch !