this post was submitted on 05 Apr 2024
127 points (96.4% liked)

Programming

17479 readers
320 users here now

Welcome to the main community in programming.dev! Feel free to post anything relating to programming here!

Cross posting is strongly encouraged in the instance. If you feel your post or another person's post makes sense in another community cross post into it.

Hope you enjoy the instance!

Rules

Rules

  • Follow the programming.dev instance rules
  • Keep content related to programming in some way
  • If you're posting long videos try to add in some form of tldr for those who don't want to watch videos

Wormhole

Follow the wormhole through a path of communities [email protected]



founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] firelizzard 3 points 7 months ago

Additionally, switch performs extra sanity checks that checkout doesn't, for example switch would abort operation if it would lead to loss of local changes.

What checks? Under what situation does checkout lead to loss of changes? If I make changes and attempt to checkout a ref that would overwrite them, I get the following error:

error: Your local changes to the following files would be overwritten by checkout:
        some/file
Please commit your changes or stash them before you switch branches.
Aborting

To my knowledge it's not possible to overwrite changes when switching branches/refs (git checkout <ref> without any other arguments or flags) so I guess what the author really means is, "If you use checkout incorrectly you can overwrite local changes." As far as I can recall I've never accidentally git checkout <ref> <some/file> so I don't see a reason to retrain my muscle memory. I do use git restore since it's behavior is a lot more obvious than checkout/reset though sometimes I still use git checkout <ref> -- <some/file> because muscle memory.