You're forgetting the stash command in your latter example. God help you if you're doing anything more than switching to one other branch at a time to make one small change and returning.

Also, if you're unlucky enough to be using an IDE that doesn't always handle large codebase changes well (e.g., let's say... Xcode), then you've eliminated that problem too.

It's indispensible for the case of `git worktree add <path> <long-running-branch>`.

The code base i work on takes a long time to rebuild when crossing certain points in the history, so I have persistent worktrees for the last few versions that we still support. Lets me drop into an older version for a backport without the long wait.

Suppose you have one repo with branches main, v1 and v2 (for example, releases are made from these). The branches are there forever, they are very long running branches.

Some days you work with v1 and some days with v2, and sometimes with main. Sometimes fixes are quick, sometimes not. Sometimes you must switch the working branch while you are in the middle of doing something that is not quite finished.

If you need to change between v1, v2 or main, just change a directory. Done.

So for the above example, setting up this:

  cd repo
  git checkout -b main origin/main
  git worktree add ../v1 origin/v1
  git worktree add ../v2 origin/v2

I.e. having a separate worktree for each long running branch makes working with the branches so much easier.

Edit: formatting

It lets you efficiently have multiple checkouts of different branches at once without duplicating the actual git storage. It also lets you leave a worktree where it is while working on another - for instance, you could have editor windows in different branches at the same time, which isn't an option if you only have one checkout and have to stash+checkout to switch branches.