Is there any way to git checkout previous branch?

Question

I sort of want the equivalent of cd - for git. If I am in branch master and I checkout foo, I would love to be able to type something like git checkout - to go back to master, and be able to type it again to return to foo.

Does anything like this exist? Would it be hard to implement?

Answer 1

From the release notes for 1.6.2

@{-1} is a way to refer to the last branch you were on. This is
accepted not only where an object name is expected, but anywhere a branch name is expected and acts as if you typed the branch name.
E.g. git branch --track mybranch @{-1}, git merge @{-1}, and
git rev-parse --symbolic-full-name @{-1} would work as expected.

and

git checkout - is a shorthand for git checkout @{-1}.

Answer 2

The simplest way of doing this nowadays is:

git checkout - 

... which is an alias of:

git checkout @{-1} 

If you want to know more about this, I wrote an entire article about it here: Checkout The Previous Branch In Git.