Switching Unstaged Changes to a New Branch

Moving In-Progress Work Without Losing It

Git work often starts on the wrong branch. The fix is straightforward: move unstaged changes from the current branch to a freshly created one. The long way involves stashing everything, returning to the main branch, pulling the latest updates, cutting a new branch, and then unstashing the stashed files.

Here’s what that manual process looks like with the Git CLI:

git status
git stash --include-untracked
git checkout master
git pull
git branch content/sharis
git checkout content/sharis
git stash pop

GUI Shortcuts and a Simpler Command

Graphical Git clients like Git Tower can also follow the same step-by-step flow. The shortcut in Tower is to create the new branch directly from the current one, then double-click to switch over to it, taking your changes along. Other GUI tools may offer similar one-click moves.

There is also a much newer and cleaner command-line approach. Instead of staging, stashing, and switching manually, you can cut a new branch and carry over your changes in a single step:

That command is:

git switch -c new-branch

Full documentation is available in the Git switch reference.