Question

I have a “dev” git branch. I made some code changes locally. I haven’t committed them to the remote “dev” branch. Now that I’m halfway through the changes, I don’t want to commit the local changes to same remote branch. I’d like to create a new branch called “over_here” and commit the changes there.

How can this be accomplished?

Answer 1

Assuming that your remote has standard git name origin:

git checkout -b over_here
git push origin over_here

Depending on if you need to reset your dev branch back to origin/dev state you could also execute

git checkout dev
git reset --hard origin/dev

UPDATE: Above was written assuming you have some changes commited. As you told in comments that you didn’t commit anything to local dev branch – you need to checkout new branch right now:

git checkout -b over_here

Now your changes still here, but you’re on the newly created branch. So you’re ready to commit your local changes:

git commit -m 'my local changes to over_here branch'

Now these changes are in your local repo only. If you want to push them into remote repository (probably github) – you should execute:

git push origin over_here

It will create new branch in the remote repository and commit your changes there.