Using Git switch to change branches

Since upgrading to macOS Big Sur and its version of Xcode Command Line Tools, I’ve noticed that git switch now works.

git checkout has always been a funny one for me; it switches branches, allows you to view code at older commits, discards changes to a file, and probably some other things I don’t know about. The Jack of all trades of Git commands.

git switch was introduced in Git version 2.23 to separate jumping from branch to branch into its own command. A checkout command would look like this:

git checkout my-feature

We can now replace that with switch:

git switch my-feature

But why is git switch a good thing?

More plain English

The main reason I like git switch is that it says what it means: switch to another branch. ‘Checking out’ another branch might make sense when we’re going back in time to have a quick look at (‘check out’), how things looked on an old commit before coming back to the present-day commit. But when when we plan to do work on a branch, we’re doing a lot more than just checking it out.

The semantics of ‘checking out’ could also be interpreted as leaving, not moving to; it’s a bit of an odd ball.

And if I’m teaching someone how to use Git, checkout has always required some explanation where switch won’t.

More sensible flags

I often like to create a new branch and ‘checkout on it’ in one move, so the following command gets a lot of use:

git checkout -b my-new-feature

Using the -b flag means ‘create a new branch that doesn’t already exist, then checkout on it’. b for ‘branch’ I guess, but that doesn’t quite make sense as we’re already doing something with a branch when we run the checkout command without the -b. So what does b stand for? Maybe ‘build’? Annoyingly, there isn’t a longhand for it, like -f has --force, so there’s no way of knowing for sure.

Happily, the switch equivalent of the -b flag makes much more sense:

git switch -c my-new-feature

c for ‘create’: we’re switching to and creating a branch. And -c has a longhand equivalent that confirms this meaning:

git switch --create my-new-feature

Single purpose

I mentioned that, as well as switching branches, git checkout allows you to jump back to a previous commit using a commit hash:

git checkout abc1234

You can also discard untracked changes to a file; for example, if I’ve made some changes to my homepage that I don’t want to keep, I might restore the file to its pre-edited state with:

git checkout index.html

You can’t do either of those things with git switch. And that’s a good thing in my eyes: one command should do one thing (which is why I also use git restore).

I’ll be using git switch to change branches in future.