How to apply diff between commits to current head in git?

Use git cherry-pick --no-commit <commit>...

Then you will get all the changes in the listed commits applied on the top of your branch, and you can commit at your leisure.

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If you have a more complicated use case, you might want to try git imerge

Its creator made an introduction blog post and a presentation about it. Both a bit old unfortunately.

The answer already given is fine when it's consecutive commits you want to grab.

However, if what you want is a general answer for a way to apply the diff between ANY two chosen commits (as I did when I found this page), then it's not so useful.

In my case I did the following:

To give names to things, let's say I wanted to apply the diff from commit1 to commit2 onto branch1 as a single commit.

Note that commit1 could be an ancestor or a "descendant" of commit2, or neither.

So I do:

git status     # Ensure working directory is clean, preferably no untracked files
git checkout -b temp-branch commit2
git reset --soft commit1
git commit -m "Everything from commit1 to commit2 as one commit"
git checkout branch1
git cherry-pick temp-branch
    # Confirm result is what you expect
git branch -D temp-branch