Branching

Branches let you work on a change in isolation without touching main. You can experiment, break things, and throw the branch away — main is never affected until you deliberately merge.

What a Branch Is

A branch is a lightweight pointer to a commit. When you create a branch, Git just makes a new pointer. No files are copied. No history is duplicated.

In this diagram:

• main points to commit C — the last commit on the main line.
• feature-greeting branched from C and has two new commits (D, E).
• HEAD is a special pointer that tracks which branch you are currently on. Here it points to feature-greeting.

main is untouched. You can switch back to it any time and it will be exactly at C.

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See Your Branches

git branch

Output:

* main

The * marks your current branch.

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Create and Switch to a New Branch

git switch -c feature-greeting

-c means "create." This creates the branch and immediately switches to it.

Confirm you switched:

git branch

Output:

* feature-greeting
  main

The older syntax (git checkout -b feature-greeting) still works. git switch is the modern, more readable alternative.

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Make Commits on the Branch

echo "Hello from the feature branch!" > greeting.txt
git add greeting.txt
git commit -m "Add greeting file"

Your branch now has a commit that main does not.

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Switch Back to Main

git switch main

Notice greeting.txt disappears from your folder. It exists on feature-greeting, not on main. The files are not deleted — they are just not part of the main snapshot.

Switch back to your feature branch:

git switch feature-greeting

greeting.txt reappears.

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Push the Branch to GitHub

git push -u origin feature-greeting

Go to your GitHub repo. In the branch dropdown you will see feature-greeting alongside main.

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Summary

Command	What it does
git branch	List branches
git switch -c <name>	Create and switch to a new branch
git switch <name>	Switch to an existing branch
git push -u origin <name>	Push branch to GitHub (first time)