Git

2875 readers

2 users here now

Git is a free and open source distributed version control system designed to handle everything from small to very large projects with speed and efficiency.

Resources

Rules

Follow programming.dev rules
Be excellent to each other, no hostility towards users for any reason
No spam of tools/companies/advertisements. It’s OK to post your own stuff part of the time, but the primary use of the community should not be self-promotion.

Git Logo by Jason Long is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.

founded 1 year ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

Git tip: switch to previous branch (programming.dev)

submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

29 comments fedilink hide all child comments

You can use git switch - to switch to the previous branch. In the following example, we see switching back and forth between branches main and my_dev_branch:

C:\git\my-repo [my_dev_branch]> git switch -
Switched to branch 'main'
Your branch is up to date with 'origin/main'.
C:\git\my-repo [main ≡]> git switch -
Switched to branch 'my_dev_branch'
C:\git\my-repo [my_dev_branch]>

Edit: Old habits die hard. Updated to use switch instead of checkout since switch has a clearer responsibility. Obviously they work exactly the same for this scenario.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] [email protected] 18 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

Which follows the similar functionality used by the cd - command to switch to the previous directory you were in. Very handy!

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago (2 children)

You can do what 👀

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago (4 children)

There's more! Well, it's more a bash thing than a cd thing.. in bash the variable $_ refers to the last argument to the previous command. So you can do the following:

> mkdir -p my/nested/dir
> cd $_
> pwd
/home/user/my/nested/dir

It's handy for a whole host of things, like piping/touching then opening a file, chown then chmod, etc.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

On many terminal emulators you can also use Alt-. to search through your history of previous arguments, so mkdir foo followed by cd [Alt-.] will populate your command line with cd foo for example. If you have some other command in between you can just hit Alt-. repeatedly

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

Or ESC followed by "." Repeating it works too.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

You are an absolute king. Never again will I cp a file to a far off land, and then retype the entire path a second time to open it. Thank you!

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

That's incredible, I never knew that. Thank you!

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

This is amazing ♥️

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago

There's also pushd and popd so that you can pushd into one directory, move around as much as you want and then go back to before the pushd with popd

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

… how have I not ever come across that before?!

This thread has been invaluable for me lol