Creating and switching branches

Branches are in the sidebar, and the switcher searches both local and remote ones at once.

Creating

Repository ▸ New Branch… creates a branch from where you are, and asks whether to check it out immediately. Both answers are useful: usually yes, because you are about to work on it; sometimes no, because you are marking a point you might come back to.

Switching

Choose a branch in the switcher or the sidebar. If your working copy is clean, that is all there is to it.

Switching with uncommitted work

Innesta offers to put your tracked changes in a stash and switch anyway, and the confirmation decides whether that stash comes back when you return to this branch. It has a page of its own: switching with uncommitted work.

If you would rather name the stash yourself, save one explicitly first, or commit.

Remote branches

Switching to a branch that only exists on the remote creates the local tracking branch for you. There is no separate “check out and track” step to remember.

Which remote branch a local one tracks — and so what its ahead and behind counts are measured against — can be changed afterwards, from the branch’s context menu. That has a page of its own: the upstream branch.

Renaming

A local branch can be renamed in place. Renaming does not touch the remote: a branch you have already pushed keeps its old name on the server until you push the new one and delete the old one.