Question

For various reasons (code review mostly) I need to switch from current development branch to other branches quite often.

Currently, I use either ‘git stash’ to shelve the uncommitted changes, checkout other branch, then switch back and do ‘git stash apply’

However, sometimes I’d have some newly added files there, which are not tracked. Unfortunately, stashing does not affect them. In this case I’d have to add them to the index and stash.

What I am looking here for is a workflow where I’d have to perform a minimal set of actions to switch the branches, preferably avoiding adding of files into the index.

Answer 1

you can clone the repo to another directory and default to the branch you want:

# assume your original repo is in myproj
$ git clone myproj myproj_clone --branch my_branch

If you then go to the myproj_clone folder, it’ll be in your branch

$ cd myproj_clone
$ git branch
* my_branch