Maybe the one thing that made it click for me was realizing that a branch is merely a label to a git commit hash. There can be local and remote ones and the loc

Maybe the one thing that made it click for me was realizing that a branch is merely a label to a git commit hash. There can be local and remote ones and the local is aware of the remote (e.g. git pull). Checking out a branch makes it current, with filesystem matching the branch head's git fileset state. New commits get added and the branch label moved to the new head. That and a git tree view GUI or "git log --oneline --graph" and "git reflog" to undo stuff. Also, you're better off committing temp stuff on the current local branch with message "WIP" than using "git stash".