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    Of course, this is not a true undo, because if the wrong git add overwrote a previous staged uncommited version, we can't recover it. I tried to clarify this in my answer below.
    – leonbloy
    Commented May 6, 2013 at 19:10
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    git reset HEAD *.ext where ext is the files of the given extension you want to unadd. For me it was *.bmp & *.zip
    – boulder_ruby
    Commented Nov 26, 2013 at 14:25
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    @Jonny, the index (aka staging area) contains all the files, not just changed files. It "starts life" (when you check out a commit or clone a repo) as a copy of all the files in the commit pointed to by HEAD. So if you remove a file from the index (git rm --cached) it means you are preparing to make a commit that deletes that file. git reset HEAD <filename> on the other hand will copy the file from HEAD to the index, so that the next commit won't show any changes being made to that file.
    – Wildcard
    Commented Mar 16, 2016 at 12:27
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    I just discovered that there is a git reset -p just like git add -p. This is awesome!
    – donquixote
    Commented Jul 17, 2016 at 23:23
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    You actually can recover overwriten previously staged but uncommited changes but not in a userfriendly way and not 100% secure (at least none I had found): goto .git/objects, search for files created at the time of git add you want to recover (61/3AF3... -> object id 613AF3...), then git cat-file -p <object-id> (might be worth it to recover several hours of work but also a lesson to commit more often...)
    – Peter Schneider
    Commented Jul 31, 2017 at 14:03