My workflow is generally

• git checkout -b topic
• Work on code, committing at various times.
• Run automated tests. Go back to working on code if a test fails.
• git rebase -i master to squash related commits.
• git checkout master
• git pull
• git rebase master topic
• Fix merge conflicts
• Run automated tests. Go back to working on code if a test fails.
• git checkout master
• git merge topic
• git branch -d topic
• git push If this fails, go back to git pull, except working in the master branch rather than the topic branch.

And I do this from a shell within emacs. For the longest time, if I really wanted to do the git rebase -i, I'd open a new window and do the rebasing in vi, so I generally skipped that step and just had a bunch of commits with identical log messages sometimes interleaved with other commits. But then I figured that was just dumb and changed my .emacs file for the first time in over 5 years, adding
(setenv "EDITOR" "/usr/bin/emacsclient")
(server-start)