Question

The command to remove a remote branch in git is the following

git push origin :/heads/[feature-name]  
       [feature-name] being the name of the branch

This does the job perfectly, true that.
However by typing it, I can make no association that what I type is actually deleting a branch.

Can you please describe why this actually works? (my question has nothing to do with how it is implemented)

Understanding this, will hopefully help me get a better grasp of how git works.

Answer 1

The format of git push (for our part) is :

git push <repository> <src>:<dst>

So using git push origin :/heads/[feature-name] says to git to push a empty branch to the feature-name branch of origin.
So you clean it.