Today I learned how to quickly switch back and forth between two different git branches.

git checkout -

Suppose you're in a git branch called fix-1523-very-important-high-priority to fix issue 1523 that is very important and high priority. Then, you checkout the main branch to pull the most recent changes, or something like that, with git checkout main. You do what you have to do on main and then you have to checkout the other branch again...

One of two things will happen:

1. you don't want to type the whole branch name again; or
2. you don't even remember the exact branch name in the first place.

You can solve both issues with git checkout -. This will checkout the most recent branch you had checked out. Isn't this amazing?

When I shared this online, someone noted this is the same with the command to change directories, cd. When you run cd -, you switch back to the previous directory you were in.

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