Quickly navigating branches in Git
As a follow-up to my last tip, you can also add this alias to be able to select one of those branches:
[alias]
switch-to-recent = "!switchtorecent() { PS3='select branch: '; select b in `git recent-branches $*` ; do echo \"switching to $b\"; git co $b; exit; done; }; switchtorecent"
Update: 2013-04-26, Added $*
to pass arguments to recent-branches
alias.
This will choose from the last 10 branches (the default in my previous post):
git switch-to-recent
If you want to change the number of branches to choose from (say to 20 instead of 10):
git switch-to-recent --count=20
Written by Jason Rogers
Related protips
2 Responses
You can switch to last used branch by typing git checkout -
@sheerun Thanks. I'm aware of that. This alias allows you to jump back and forth between the last 10 branches you've been active on. git checkout -
, as you pointed out, only allows you to go back to the branch you were on previously.
Honestly 10 is a high number of branches to be doing context switching. This alias could be tweaked to take a different count and pass that to the for-each-ref
alias. However, 10 seemed like a nice round number and fits on the screen nicely.