Quickly switch between recent branches in Git
When working on projects, it’s often a case when you would find yourself dabbling between different branches. Maybe you’re working on different features simultaneously or you’re keeping your feature branch up-to-date with your master/main branch. You would need to switch between branches in any of the cases.
For instance, let’s say I’m currently on the master
branch and I have a feature branch called ui-improvements
that I want to work on.
To switch to this branch, I would use git checkout
like so.
$ git checkout ui-improvements
Now, I’m done with the feature and now I want to switch back to master again. How would you do that?
The quicker way
You might use the git checkout master
command normally. But there’s a quicker way to do so. Check this out!
$ git checkout -
Switched to branch 'master'
As you can tell, using -
with git checkout
will switch back to the most recent branch which in our case is master
. And that’s it! You don’t need to specify the name of the previous branch.
Now if you want to switch back to ui-improvements
once again, you can use git checkout -
to do so.
This is how the switching between branches looks like when using this command.
👋 Hi there! I'm Amit. I write articles about all things web development. If you like what I write and want me to continue doing the same, I would like you buy me some coffees. I'd highly appreciate that. Cheers!