Question

It usually happens to me that I make some local changes, only to discover that I made it on the wrong branch, so I need to switch branch before committing. The problem is that I cannot switch branch when there are local changes. Is there anyway to do that?

Obviously, I can copy the updated files, switch branch, then copy them back, but this doesn’t really seem clever!

Answer 1

You can switch branches while you have local modifications unless your local changes conflict with the difference between the two branches. In this case you can use the -m or --merge option to checkout to perform the checkout anyway and perform a merge betwee changes and the changes caused by switching branches.

git checkout -m other-branch