branch 🌳

Often I see people have workflows involving a shortcut for common Git operations, and that can be useful. But I also think learning those shortcuts first can stand in the way of understanding the basics of a command like branch — and all the different options the command has.

# List branches

git branch
git branch --verbose
git branch --merged
git branch --no-merged
git branch --sort=committerdate

# Create a new branch

git branch name-of-your-new-branch

# Delete branches

git branch --delete name-of-old-branch-to-delete

Rename branch

When I start working on something, I never know what to name that branch. I will often initially name any new branch something like wip or wip-whatever and then later rename the branch after I understand which commits I intend to park on that specific branch.

# Move and rename

git branch --move new-branch-name

Delete Multiple Local Branches

# Delete all local branches that are fully merged

git branch | grep --invert-match "main" | xargs git branch -d

Deconstructed this command will:

git branch to list existing branches
| is a pipe that takes the result from the command on it’s left and sends that into what ever comes on the right hand side of the pipe
grep --invert-match "main-" to find branch names not matching ‘main’
another pipe | so any and all branches not matching ‘main’ are piped into the next command
xargs to repeat what comes next for each output
git branch -d to ‘delete fully merged branch’

And if I’m absolutely certain I have no local commits I want to keep, I can replace the -d with -D:

-d, --delete          delete fully merged branch
-D                    delete branch (even if not merged)

But wait, there’s more!

git branch -h