The GP was talking about "moving the branch pointer", which checkout does not do. I am encouraging you (for the second time) to read the thread you are replying

The GP was talking about "moving the branch pointer", which checkout does not do. I am encouraging you (for the second time) to read the thread you are replying into... git checkout can also nuke changes from both working copy and staging area. `git checkout <path>` will nuke working copy (and auto-completion is likely to give you a path when you were looking for a branch), `git checkout <ref> <path>` will nuke both. No --force required in either case, so let's not pretend that you can't lose changes without a scary-looking flag like --force or --hard.