A Powerful Git Trick No One Knows About

Here is a Git trick I learned a long time ago that I can’t live without (and when I say no one knows about it, I mean it – it is not well documented, and no developers I have worked with knew about it):

Some git commands take - (dash) as the reference to the previous branch.

git checkout and git merge are two commands I use it with all the time.

git checkout - switches to the previous branch. This makes toggling between the two most recently used branches quick and super easy:

git merge - merges the previous branch to the current branch. It is especially powerful when combined with git checkout -. You can switch to the target branch and then merge from the previous branch like this:

One command I wish supported - is git branch -d. It would make cleaning branches after merging effortless. Presumably, this option is not available to prevent accidentally deleting the wrong branches.

Bonus trick

While we are at it – did you know that the cd (change directory) shell command also supports -? You can use cd - to toggle between the two most recent directories.