(no subject)

[François WAUQUIER]

Hi

$ git checkout -

I often use this command to go back to previous branch from my history.
It is quite natural as it uses the same syntax as “cd -“

But i found out it is not documented in
https://git-scm.com/docs/git-checkout/2.24.0
I report this to help others to discover this time saving command.

Thanks for the great work with git
Happy new year

-- 
François Wauquier

Re: git checkout -

[Jonathan Nieder]

Hi,

François WAUQUIER wrote:

> $ git checkout -
>
> I often use this command to go back to previous branch from my history.
> It is quite natural as it uses the same syntax as “cd -“
>
> But i found out it is not documented in
> https://git-scm.com/docs/git-checkout/2.24.0
> I report this to help others to discover this time saving command.

Thanks for reporting!

Ideas for what the documentation should say about it?  (Bonus points
if it comes in the form of a patch against Documentation/git-checkout.txt.
;-)  See [1] for more about how that works.)

Sincerely,
Jonathan

[1] https://www.kernel.org/pub/software/scm/git/docs/SubmittingPatches.html

Re: git checkout -

[Todd Zullinger]

Hi,

Jonathan Nieder wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> François WAUQUIER wrote:
> 
>> $ git checkout -
>>
>> I often use this command to go back to previous branch from my history.
>> It is quite natural as it uses the same syntax as “cd -“
>>
>> But i found out it is not documented in
>> https://git-scm.com/docs/git-checkout/2.24.0
>> I report this to help others to discover this time saving command.
> 
> Thanks for reporting!
> 
> Ideas for what the documentation should say about it?  (Bonus points
> if it comes in the form of a patch against Documentation/git-checkout.txt.
> ;-)  See [1] for more about how that works.)

Not to say that it can't possibly be improved, but it is
mentioned in the git-checkout docs here[1].  The second
paragraph in that section says:

    You can use the @{-N} syntax to refer to the N-th last
    branch/commit checked out using "git checkout"
    operation. You may also specify - which is synonymous to
    @{-1}.

This is also in the git-switch documentation, where it might
be easier to find, as it's very close to the beginning of
git-switch's man page, in the "<start-point>" entry of the
OPTIONS section[2].

Being easy to miss in the git-checkout documentation might
make Duy smile; it shows the benefit of splitting some of
the many features of 'checkout' to the 'switch' command. :)

[1] https://git-scm.com/docs/git-checkout#Documentation/git-checkout.txt-ltbranchgt
[2] https://git-scm.com/docs/git-switch#Documentation/git-switch.txt-ltstart-pointgt

-- 
Todd