What is Staging Area (or Index) in Git?

Imagine you have fifty changes in your workspace and you want to send just five of them to the local repository while the rest would be skipped. How will you do it in such a way that all the five changes would be sent to the local repository at once?

The Staging Area is here to the rescue.

The Staging Area is like a box. All changes that should later go to the repository will be put into this box. The changes that you want to skip won't be put there.

After you carefully selected changes and put them into the box (staged), you can quickly check what is in the box. If you are satisfied with what you see, you can then take all the items from the box and put them to the repository.

The Staging Area is sometimes called as Index.