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You cannot recover your unstaged changes if you happen to toast them with "git checkout --".

Only if it's been committed once. If it's untracked when you wipe it away, it's gone.

Not if they were never committed in the first place. It sounds like if you made changes without committing them (new files or modified committed files), and then branch switch, that content is gone with no warning.

Git usually aborts any checkouts or merges that destroy the working directory. You can however use `git reset --hard HEAD` (which I aliased nuke) and it will happily oblige.