Switch to another branch without changing the workspace files

Question

I cloned a git repository from GitHub, made some changes and some commits; I made quite a lot and all are quite dirty, so they\'re not suitable for a pull request. Now I created

Answer 1

Why not just git reset --soft ?

Demonstration:

mkdir myrepo; cd myrepo; git init
touch poem; git add poem; git commit -m 'add poem'  # first commit
git branch original
echo bananas > poem; git commit -am 'change poem'  # second commit
echo are tasty >> poem  # unstaged change
git reset --soft original

Result:

$ git diff --cached
diff --git a/poem b/poem
index e69de29..9baf85e 100644
--- a/poem
+++ b/poem
@@ -0,0 +1 @@
+bananas
$ git diff
diff --git a/poem b/poem
index 9baf85e..ac01489 100644
--- a/poem
+++ b/poem
@@ -1 +1,2 @@
 bananas
+are tasty

One thing to note though, is that the current branch changes to original. You’re still left in the previous branch after the process, but can easily git checkout original, because it’s the same state. If you do not want to lose the previous HEAD, you should note the commit reference and do git branch -f after that.