CODEWITHSUNDEEP
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Ákos Vandra-Meyer
Ákos Vandra-Meyer

Reputation: 2175

git change branch - leave changes

Changing a branch with git checkout usually takes uncommitted changes to the new branch (and tries to merge them in, or fail).

Sometimes I'm working in a feature branch, and I am not quite ready with whatever I'm working on to commit them, but need to switch branches because I need to work on something else.

If this is just a "quick look" stashing, changing branches there and back and unstashing works.

If this is something that requires more time (in some cases two days or even a week), stashing is not really a good option, as other stuff may get stashed, so it's not exactly straight-forward to find which stash I am looking for), and even after changing back to the old branch, sometimes I even forget that I had a half-solution already. Committing everything as a "wip" commit, and then later soft-resetting or amending that would be an okayish workaround, but it's still a workaround, and again may be forgotten that a wip commit is there, messing up the git log, unless one again spends time and effort to rebase stuff.

So the question is:

Is it possible to change branches, without committing changes, and without taking them to the new branch? And when changing back, the changes would be there either staged or unstaged?

Upvotes: 0

Views: 132

Answers (1)

Frost
Frost

Reputation: 11977

I don't think that is possible using just git branch. You should, however, be able to use git worktree in order to have multiple versions of your repository checked out in different directories.

Here's a link to the documentation for git worktree: https://git-scm.com/docs/git-worktree

Upvotes: 1

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