these are smart guys Committed state A file is in the committed state when all the changes made to the file have been saved in the local repo. Files in the committed stage are files ready to be pushed to the remote repo (on GitHub). Modified state A file in the modified state has some changes made to it but it's not yet saved. This means that the state of the file has been altered from its previous state in the committed state. Staged state A file in the staged state means it is ready to be committed. In this state, all necessary changes have been made so the next step is to move the file to the commit state. You can understand this better by imagining Git as a camera. The camera will only take a snapshot when the file reaches the commit state. After this state, the camera starts comparing changes being made to the same file with the last snapshot (this is the modified state). And when the required changes have been made, the file is staged and moved to the commit state for a new snapshot