You can use git switch - to switch to the previous branch. In the following example, we see switching back and forth between branches main and my_dev_branch:

C:\git\my-repo [my_dev_branch]> git switch -
Switched to branch 'main'
Your branch is up to date with 'origin/main'.
C:\git\my-repo [main ≡]> git switch -
Switched to branch 'my_dev_branch'
C:\git\my-repo [my_dev_branch]>

Edit: Old habits die hard. Updated to use switch instead of checkout since switch has a clearer responsibility. Obviously they work exactly the same for this scenario.

  • @[email protected]English
    16•1 year ago

    Which follows the similar functionality used by the cd - command to switch to the previous directory you were in. Very handy!

      • @[email protected]English
        8•1 year ago

        There’s more! Well, it’s more a bash thing than a cd thing… in bash the variable $_ refers to the last argument to the previous command. So you can do the following:

        > mkdir -p my/nested/dir
> cd $_
> pwd
/home/user/my/nested/dir

        It’s handy for a whole host of things, like piping/touching then opening a file, chown then chmod, etc.

        • @[email protected]English
          4•1 year ago

          On many terminal emulators you can also use Alt-. to search through your history of previous arguments, so mkdir foo followed by cd [Alt-.] will populate your command line with cd foo for example. If you have some other command in between you can just hit Alt-. repeatedly

      • @[email protected]English
        5•1 year ago

        There’s also pushd and popd so that you can pushd into one directory, move around as much as you want and then go back to before the pushd with popd