In some cases (all my usecases, but perhaps yours are different) the staging are...

ptx on July 12, 2020 | parent | context | favorite | on: Ask HN: What's the worst piece of software you use...

In some cases (all my usecases, but perhaps yours are different) the staging area can be replaced by some combination of "hg commit --amend" and "hg commit --interactive" - or in older versions "hg rollback" and "hg record".