Use the Git stash without shooting yourself in the foot

The Git stash does not work like a one-slot clipboard and you might shoot yourself in the foot if you pretend otherwise.

In particular git stash apply does not remove the stashed changes from the stash. That means you will probably apply the wrong stash when you do git stash apply after a future stashing.

To keep your stash clean, you can use

git stash pop

instead.

Another way to look at it:

git stash pop 

is the same as

git stash apply && git stash drop

Notice: In case of a conflict git will not pop the changes, you will need to drop the uppermost stash, if you merged successfully:

git stash drop