How to move unfinished work to another branch if you need to switch urgently?

Often during the development process, a situation arises where you are enthusiastically writing code in the current branch, but suddenly a task comes in to urgently fix a critical bug in production. Direct switching to another branch via checkout or switch is impossible if your current changes conflict with the target branch or if you do not want to commit them in a raw state at all.

The quickest solution to this problem is temporary isolation of changes. For this, you can use the git stash command, which saves all modified tracked files in a special hidden storage and returns the working directory to the state of the last commit. However, the git stash command has a more advanced alternative — creating a temporary branch on the fly.

If you want to completely isolate unfinished functionality, it is best to fix your current progress by creating a separate temporary branch. For this, the git checkout -b temp-fix or git switch -c temp-fix command is used. You can make an intermediate commit of the current state, even if the code is not yet fully ready or does not build.

After this, you safely switch to the required production branch, fix the bug, push the fix to the remote repository, and return back. If you used a temporary branch for your raw edits, upon return you can continue working from the same place or merge this temporary branch with the main working branch after completing the urgent task.

If you nevertheless applied stashing, then to return the changes back to the working directory, the git stash pop command is used. It extracts the latest entry from the stack and applies it to the current code, simultaneously removing this entry from storage. This approach allows you to flexibly manage your working context and not lose developments when switching between tasks.