Why Move Commits to a New Branch?

Before diving into the steps, let’s briefly discuss why you might want to move commits to a new branch:

1. Correcting Mistakes: You may have accidentally committed changes to the wrong branch and need to move them to the correct one.
2. Isolating Changes: You might start working on a feature and realize it’s better suited as a separate branch for better organization and testing.
3. Collaborative Workflow: Moving commits can help maintain a clean and organized workflow, especially in collaborative environments where each branch represents a specific task or feature.

Some terminological commands to do the task:

• HEAD: Head pointer is the pointer that points to the most recent commit, which is reflected in the working tree. It stands for the currently checked out commit we’re working on.
• git commit -m <message>: The current contents or changes in the repository are recorded through git committing. After git add  command, all the updated files reach the staging area, after which git commit fetch the changes to the repository with the commit message.
• git branch <branch>: This command creates a new branch. This branch is nothing but a pointer to the snapshot of our changes from our main repository.
• Relative references: Specifying commits by their hashes is a tedious job. So we use relative commits. One of them is ^ which means moving upwards one commit and ~<num> means moving upwards a number of times.
• git hard reset to head: The purpose of the ‘git reset’ command is to move the current head to the commit specified. The –hard  option is used in order to reset the files of the index or the staging area and the changes in those files are lost, thus untracking them.
• git checkout <branch>: The Git checkout command lets us navigate between the branches created by git branch. Checking out a branch updates the files in the working directory to match the version stored in that branch.

Git offers powerful features for managing your codebase efficiently. Sometimes, you may find yourself needing to move the most recent commit(s) to a new branch in Git. This could be due to various reasons, such as realizing that changes were made on the wrong branch or wanting to isolate experimental work. Fortunately, Git provides simple ways to accomplish this task. In this article, we’ll explore how to move the most recent commit(s) to a new branch with Git.