Undo IntelliJ Smart Checkout
IntelliJ has a feature that's very cool in theory, called Smart Checkout. This feature kicks in when you're changing branches and you have files in the current branch that you've modified but haven't committed.
Instead of forcing you to commit, stash or shelve your changes, it stashes them for you, switches branches, then runs stash pop in the new branch.
I guess this is what you'd want sometimes, but I ran this when switching to the wrong branch.
So, now my master branch is all full of changes that belong in another branch, some files are reporting merge conflicts, and I have all kinds of pain.
What I want to accomplish is:
- Cleanly remove the changes from the master branch.
- Move them back to the branch where I was working.
Is there a way to do this?
Answer
Here's at least a partial answer that works if you had a merge conflict during the stash pop. As mentioned in my question, stash is used by the Smart Checkout feature to stash your local changes, and then to apply them to the new branch after it is checked out.
The way IntelliJ does this is by using stash in the branch you're presently in, and then using stash pop in the branch you're switching to.
When the changes are stashed, they get put onto a stack of stashed changes, at the top. Then, when stash pop runs, those changes are popped off the stack and applied.
At least, in most cases, that's what happens. If there's a merge conflict, however, IntelliJ informs you of such and the stash is kept. You can see the stack of stashes by running:
git stash list
If the stash you want is still listed, what you can do is simply checkout the branch you were originally on. Reset it, then do stash apply, which is like stash pop, but doesn't remove the stash from the list. So:
git checkout $original-branch
git reset HARD
git stash apply
Then, if all is well, you can remove the stash with:
git stash drop
Since this answer is pretty rough and only covers one situation, I'm marking it as a community wiki. Improvements very much welcome.