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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-20T15:25:02+00:00

Fellow coders, today is my first dive into git using Tower on the Mac

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Fellow coders, today is my first dive into git using Tower on the Mac – life’s too short to mess with the command line 😉

I did read a few intros and tutorials but none addressed the question I’m writing about. I’m having some trouble understanding the working directory concept in git vs. SVN.

What I did:

  1. I created a local repo and pointed it to the folder where my project files are.
  2. Added and committed all the files in the folder.
  3. Edited a file. Showed up as modified.
  4. Added and committed the file.

These steps worked.

So far I have not been asked for the location of the working directory and I cannot checkout the master HEAD (the option is disabled). My question is: Is my original folder acting as the checkout working directory? When does the checkout command work? Does it only come to play when I have multiple branches?

Hope someone can clarify this before I go any further.

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    A slightly shorter answer to your questions:

    • yes, your original folder acts as the working directory for the current branch
    • there’s no checkout command as you may be used to; instead git checkout is used to switch between branches
    • you can switch to the master branch which is the one created by default – this would be the head compared to SVN (but it’s not called HEAD)
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