NAME

       git-switch - Switch branches

SYNOPSIS

       git switch [<options>] [--no-guess] <branch>
       git switch [<options>] --detach [<start-point>]
       git switch [<options>] (-c|-C) <new-branch> [<start-point>]
       git switch [<options>] --orphan <new-branch>

DESCRIPTION

       Switch to a specified branch. The working tree and the index are updated to match the branch. All new
       commits will be added to the tip of this branch.

       Optionally a new branch could be created with either -c, -C, automatically from a remote branch of same
       name (see --guess), or detach the working tree from any branch with --detach, along with switching.

       Switching branches does not require a clean index and working tree (i.e. no differences compared to
       HEAD). The operation is aborted however if the operation leads to loss of local changes, unless told
       otherwise with --discard-changes or --merge.

       THIS COMMAND IS EXPERIMENTAL. THE BEHAVIOR MAY CHANGE.

OPTIONS

       <branch>
           Branch to switch to.

       <new-branch>
           Name for the new branch.

       <start-point>
           The starting point for the new branch. Specifying a <start-point> allows you to create a branch based
           on some other point in history than where HEAD currently points. (Or, in the case of --detach, allows
           you to inspect and detach from some other point.)

           You can use the @{-N} syntax to refer to the N-th last branch/commit switched to using "git switch"
           or "git checkout" operation. You may also specify - which is synonymous to @{-1}. This is often used
           to switch quickly between two branches, or to undo a branch switch by mistake.

           As a special case, you may use A...B as a shortcut for the merge base of A and B if there is exactly
           one merge base. You can leave out at most one of A and B, in which case it defaults to HEAD.

       -c <new-branch>, --create <new-branch>
           Create a new branch named <new-branch> starting at <start-point> before switching to the branch. This
           is a convenient shortcut for:

               $ git branch <new-branch>
               $ git switch <new-branch>

       -C <new-branch>, --force-create <new-branch>
           Similar to --create except that if <new-branch> already exists, it will be reset to <start-point>.
           This is a convenient shortcut for:

               $ git branch -f <new-branch>
               $ git switch <new-branch>

       -d, --detach
           Switch to a commit for inspection and discardable experiments. See the "DETACHED HEAD" section in
           git-checkout(1) for details.

       --guess, --no-guess
           If <branch> is not found but there does exist a tracking branch in exactly one remote (call it
           <remote>) with a matching name, treat as equivalent to

               $ git switch -c <branch> --track <remote>/<branch>

           If the branch exists in multiple remotes and one of them is named by the checkout.defaultRemote
           configuration variable, we’ll use that one for the purposes of disambiguation, even if the <branch>
           isn’t unique across all remotes. Set it to e.g.  checkout.defaultRemote=origin to always checkout
           remote branches from there if <branch> is ambiguous but exists on the origin remote. See also
           checkout.defaultRemote in git-config(1).

           --guess is the default behavior. Use --no-guess to disable it.

           The default behavior can be set via the checkout.guess configuration variable.

       -f, --force
           An alias for --discard-changes.

       --discard-changes
           Proceed even if the index or the working tree differs from HEAD. Both the index and working tree are
           restored to match the switching target. If --recurse-submodules is specified, submodule content is
           also restored to match the switching target. This is used to throw away local changes.

       -m, --merge
           If you have local modifications to one or more files that are different between the current branch
           and the branch to which you are switching, the command refuses to switch branches in order to
           preserve your modifications in context. However, with this option, a three-way merge between the
           current branch, your working tree contents, and the new branch is done, and you will be on the new
           branch.

           When a merge conflict happens, the index entries for conflicting paths are left unmerged, and you
           need to resolve the conflicts and mark the resolved paths with git add (or git rm if the merge should
           result in deletion of the path).

       --conflict=<style>
           The same as --merge option above, but changes the way the conflicting hunks are presented, overriding
           the merge.conflictStyle configuration variable. Possible values are "merge" (default), "diff3", and
           "zdiff3".

       -q, --quiet
           Quiet, suppress feedback messages.

       --progress, --no-progress
           Progress status is reported on the standard error stream by default when it is attached to a
           terminal, unless --quiet is specified. This flag enables progress reporting even if not attached to a
           terminal, regardless of --quiet.

       -t, --track [direct|inherit]
           When creating a new branch, set up "upstream" configuration.  -c is implied. See --track in git-
           branch(1) for details.

           If no -c option is given, the name of the new branch will be derived from the remote-tracking branch,
           by looking at the local part of the refspec configured for the corresponding remote, and then
           stripping the initial part up to the "*". This would tell us to use hack as the local branch when
           branching off of origin/hack (or remotes/origin/hack, or even refs/remotes/origin/hack). If the given
           name has no slash, or the above guessing results in an empty name, the guessing is aborted. You can
           explicitly give a name with -c in such a case.

       --no-track
           Do not set up "upstream" configuration, even if the branch.autoSetupMerge configuration variable is
           true.

       --orphan <new-branch>
           Create a new orphan branch, named <new-branch>. All tracked files are removed.

       --ignore-other-worktrees
           git switch refuses when the wanted ref is already checked out by another worktree. This option makes
           it check the ref out anyway. In other words, the ref can be held by more than one worktree.

       --recurse-submodules, --no-recurse-submodules
           Using --recurse-submodules will update the content of all active submodules according to the commit
           recorded in the superproject. If nothing (or --no-recurse-submodules) is used, submodules working
           trees will not be updated. Just like git-submodule(1), this will detach HEAD of the submodules.

EXAMPLES

       The following command switches to the "master" branch:

           $ git switch master

       After working in the wrong branch, switching to the correct branch would be done using:

           $ git switch mytopic

       However, your "wrong" branch and correct "mytopic" branch may differ in files that you have modified
       locally, in which case the above switch would fail like this:

           $ git switch mytopic
           error: You have local changes to 'frotz'; not switching branches.

       You can give the -m flag to the command, which would try a three-way merge:

           $ git switch -m mytopic
           Auto-merging frotz

       After this three-way merge, the local modifications are not registered in your index file, so git diff
       would show you what changes you made since the tip of the new branch.

       To switch back to the previous branch before we switched to mytopic (i.e. "master" branch):

           $ git switch -

       You can grow a new branch from any commit. For example, switch to "HEAD~3" and create branch "fixup":

           $ git switch -c fixup HEAD~3
           Switched to a new branch 'fixup'

       If you want to start a new branch from a remote branch of the same name:

           $ git switch new-topic
           Branch 'new-topic' set up to track remote branch 'new-topic' from 'origin'
           Switched to a new branch 'new-topic'

       To check out commit HEAD~3 for temporary inspection or experiment without creating a new branch:

           $ git switch --detach HEAD~3
           HEAD is now at 9fc9555312 Merge branch 'cc/shared-index-permbits'

       If it turns out whatever you have done is worth keeping, you can always create a new name for it (without
       switching away):

           $ git switch -c good-surprises

CONFIGURATION

       Everything below this line in this section is selectively included from the git-config(1) documentation.
       The content is the same as what’s found there:

       checkout.defaultRemote
           When you run git checkout <something> or git switch <something> and only have one remote, it may
           implicitly fall back on checking out and tracking e.g.  origin/<something>. This stops working as
           soon as you have more than one remote with a <something> reference. This setting allows for setting
           the name of a preferred remote that should always win when it comes to disambiguation. The typical
           use-case is to set this to origin.

           Currently this is used by git-switch(1) and git-checkout(1) when git checkout <something> or git
           switch <something> will checkout the <something> branch on another remote, and by git-worktree(1)
           when git worktree add refers to a remote branch. This setting might be used for other checkout-like
           commands or functionality in the future.

       checkout.guess
           Provides the default value for the --guess or --no-guess option in git checkout and git switch. See
           git-switch(1) and git-checkout(1).

       checkout.workers
           The number of parallel workers to use when updating the working tree. The default is one, i.e.
           sequential execution. If set to a value less than one, Git will use as many workers as the number of
           logical cores available. This setting and checkout.thresholdForParallelism affect all commands that
           perform checkout. E.g. checkout, clone, reset, sparse-checkout, etc.

           Note: Parallel checkout usually delivers better performance for repositories located on SSDs or over
           NFS. For repositories on spinning disks and/or machines with a small number of cores, the default
           sequential checkout often performs better. The size and compression level of a repository might also
           influence how well the parallel version performs.

       checkout.thresholdForParallelism
           When running parallel checkout with a small number of files, the cost of subprocess spawning and
           inter-process communication might outweigh the parallelization gains. This setting allows you to
           define the minimum number of files for which parallel checkout should be attempted. The default is
           100.

SEE ALSO

       git-checkout(1), git-branch(1)

GIT

       Part of the git(1) suite