Comment by sjwright | Hacker News Reader

Comment by sjwright | Hacker News Reader

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> but I disagree that this is one of those cases

I do think this is precisely one of those cases.

"Branch" is a major, repo-modifying operation; "checkout" is a trivial context switch operation. The user interface disaster here was that the major operation is treated as subservient to the trivial operation. It should be the other way around.

Therefore, the shortcut for creating a branch and switching to it should be

  git branch -c new-branch

whereby the -c switch checks you into that branch immediately.

branches aren't supposed to be "major". That's the major difference between a system like git and svn. branches are cheap. They are supposed to be used often and even be disposable.

Indeed. "git branch" is a lot like "mkdir". If you accidentally make a branch, deleting it with "git branch -d my-branch" is about as easy as typing "rmdir my-dir".

Nobody would argue that mkdir is a more major operation than cd. Which is my point.

I don't understand how creating a branch is a major operation.

Creating a branch is non-destructive and cheap, tidying up after accidental creation is also easy.

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