Popular:
 Building Resilient Systems on AWS: Learn how to design and implement a resilient, highly available, fault-tolerant infrastructure on AWS.

Checkout the Previous Branch with git

By  on  

Command line shortcuts are can be a huge time saver, which is why I like creating bash aliases and and enjoy other tricks I've found.  I do have a list of tasks I don't yet have a shortcut for, like easy switching between my current branch and the previous branch.  I have to do this often when I update master via remote pull and then rebasing a feature branch, and since many of my branch names include a hard to remember bug number, switching between branches is a pain.

I recently found out that you can switch the the previous branch you were on using the following command:

git checkout master

# Do whatever
git pull remote master

# Go back to the previous branch
git checkout -

Using - references the previous branch name, thus allowing you to navigate branches with ease!

Request Metrics real user monitoring
Request Metrics real user monitoring
Request Metrics real user monitoring
Request Metrics real user monitoring

Recent Features

  • By
    Welcome to My New Office

    My first professional web development was at a small print shop where I sat in a windowless cubical all day. I suffered that boxed in environment for almost five years before I was able to find a remote job where I worked from home. The first...

  • By
    Write Better JavaScript with Promises

    You've probably heard the talk around the water cooler about how promises are the future. All of the cool kids are using them, but you don't see what makes them so special. Can't you just use a callback? What's the big deal? In this article, we'll...

Incredible Demos

Discussion

  1. Sam

    Like in the terminal:

    cd -

    To return to the previously visited directory.

  2. Ezeikel

    Also useful when you want to merge the branch that you were just working on into dev/master (or any branch really)

    git checkout master
git merge -

Wrap your code in <pre class="{language}"></pre> tags, link to a GitHub gist, JSFiddle fiddle, or CodePen pen to embed!