git best practices for quickly switching between branches

Question

I have multiple active branches that I need to work on at the same time. Clearly I can create two working directories with a distinct branch per directory. Is that the only way to do it without having to "commit" and "checkout" in order to switch from one branch to another?

Answer 1

If you are temporarily switching branches git stash is useful, however, remember that commits don’t need to persist forever; you may make temporary commits to roll back later.

So my recommendation is, if it is a many hours long switch, to do a git commit instead, because, depending on your memory, stashes can be easy to forget/lose/etc.

[In MyBranch] >$ git commit -m "WIP: Stuff I was working on." >$ git checkout AnotherBranch [Do Stuff] >$ git checkout MyBranch >$ git reset HEAD^ [Continue] 

And since this is a question about best practices, remember to give your stash a useful message using git stash save otherwise it can be difficult to find later.