prodissues

Copy Git Changes to a New Branch

Thu 12 November 2015 by yaniv

I'm still not fluent with git and version control. I manage repositories for projects I'm working on, but sill have hard time managing my changes, commits and branches.

For example, I'm currently working on integrating Emacs's org-mode support to Pelican, a static web-page generator I use for this blog. I was proud of myself for remembering to create a new branch when starting the work. Somewhere in the middle of the integration, I drift away, and started to explore a new idea - adding a commenting system to the site. Before I knew it I was already working on it. Unfortunately, not only that I didn't work on that feature in a dedicated branch, I was still on the branch I created for the org integration.

I wondered if there is a way to take the changes I made since the last commit, and pour them over into a new branch. Luckily, there is. Here's how, thank to this answer in stack-overflow:

You can simply check out a new branch, and then commit:

git checkout -b my_new_branch 
git commit

Checking out the new branch will not discard your changes.

Tried it and it worked.