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 the transactional equivalent of

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

           that is to say, the branch is not reset/created unless "git switch" is successful
           (e.g., when the branch is in use in another worktree, not just the current branch
           stays the same, but the branch is not reset to the start-point, either).

       -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 unborn 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