theoretically you could use git without branches

You could keep track of your commit IDs manually:

Illustration of a smiling stick figure with medium-length straight hair.

person: hmm, what was I working on? oh yes, a38b997!

But most people use branches.

every branch has 3 things

• a name (like main)
• a latest commit (like 2e9ffc)
• a reflog of how that branch has evolved over time (page 26)

Branches also sometimes have a corresponding remote branch which they “track”

branches are core to how git stores your work

If your commits are “lost” (not on a branch) (page 13):

• (sad face) git’s garbage collection will eventually delete them
• (sad face) they’ll become incredibly difficult to find

the only difference between the main branch and any other branch is how you treat them

For example: it’s common to never commit to main directly, and instead commit to other branches which you merge into main when you’re done.

all changes to a branch are recorded in its reflog

The reflog records every rebase, amended commit, pull, merge, reset, commit, etc. You can look at the reflog like this:

git reflog BRANCHNAME

reflog stands for “reference log” (not re-flog ) (smiley face)

git will let you do literally anything with a branch

• when you push/pull a branch, the local branch name doesn’t have to match the remote branch name
• you can remove commits from a branch with git reset

Git often won’t protect you from messing up your branch!