switch to another branch without committing

Question

I am working on a feature branch and have not finished the work there - Now I need to change to a different branch to fix something

for example

feat1 - 6+ files changed

When I checkout to feat2 branch, after git add . in feat1, git seems to carry over the staged yet uncommitted file changes.

If I commit these file changes in feat1, checking out to feat2 will not carry over those changes

How can I switch branches without committing file changes?

Answer 1

Stash them:

$ git stash save -u "Some logical description of the changes"
$ git stash list
stash@{0}: Some logical description of the changes
$ git checkout other-branch

When you're done, you can use git stash apply to apply the changes in your stash and keep the stash around, or git stash pop to apply the changes and remove the stash as long as there are no conflicts.

If you end up with multiple stashes at once you can apply or pop them in an arbitrary order using the stash@ string, e.g. git stash apply stash@{6}.