When working with Git, you might find yourself in a situation where you’ve made changes to your files but haven’t committed them yet. You realize that these changes should be in a new branch rather than the current one, typically master or main. This guide will show you how to create a new branch and move your unstaged or uncommitted changes to it without losing any work.

Understanding Unstaged and Uncommitted Changes

• Unstaged Changes: These are modifications to your files that have not yet been added to the staging area using git add.
• Uncommitted Changes: These include both staged and unstaged changes that have not been committed to the repository with git commit.

Steps to Create a Branch from Unstaged/Uncommitted Changes

Step 1: Check the Current Status

First, check the current status of your working directory to see what changes you have:

git status

This command will show you the modified files and indicate whether they are staged or unstaged.

Step 2: Stash Your Changes

To safely move your changes to a new branch, you can temporarily save them using Git’s stash feature. This will clear your working directory so you can switch branches without losing any changes.

git stash push -m "Save changes before creating a new branch"

Step 3: Create and Switch to the New Branch

Now, create a new branch and switch to it. Replace new-branch-name with your desired branch name:

git checkout -b new-branch-name

Step 4: Apply the Stashed Changes

After switching to the new branch, you can apply the stashed changes:

git stash pop

This command will reapply the changes you saved in the stash to your working directory. If there are any conflicts, Git will notify you, and you can resolve them as needed.

Step 5: Verify Your Changes

Finally, verify that your changes have been successfully moved to the new branch:

git status

You should see the same changes listed in the status output as before.

Optional: Clean Up the Stash

If the stash pop command was successful and you no longer need the stash entry, you don’t need to do anything further. The stash pop command removes the applied stash by default. However, if you used git stash apply instead, you can manually drop the stash entry to keep your stash list clean:

git stash drop

Alternative Method: Using Checkout with Pathspecs

If you prefer not to use the stash, there’s an alternative method using git checkout with pathspecs:

Step 1: Stage Your Changes

Stage all your changes, both tracked and untracked:

git add -A

Step 2: Create and Switch to the New Branch

Create and switch to the new branch:

git checkout -b new-branch-name

Step 3: Unstage the Changes

Unstage the changes, leaving them in the working directory of the new branch:

git reset