Some things bug me in checkout; it should never have had a -b option so that it does "git branch" things along with checking out. It was probably done that way

Some things bug me in checkout; it should never have had a -b option so that it does "git branch" things along with checking out. It was probably done that way because early in Git's development, there was a lot of fuss about it having light weight branching, and what looks even more light weight is when you can instantly create a branch and switch to it with one command. There is a consistency in checkout and reset. Both checkout and reset can be whole or partial (terms I made up). Partial checkouts and resets specify paths. Whole specify at most a revision. The checkout operation updates the indexed and working copies of files to be like what is specified in a given revision. - A whole checkout to another revision, if it succeeds, will update the working files and index to what is in that revision, and move HEAD to it. - A partial checkout updates the specified files, working and index, to what they look like in the given revision, without moving HEAD. - A whole reset to to another revision updates just the index to that revision, and moves the current branch and HEAD to it. Working files stay the same. - A partial reset updates the index entries for the specified files, to the given revision, without moving HEAD or branch. Working files stay the same. There are obviously more details, due to various options like reset --hard and so on, plus considerations of what happens with a dirty index. But that's the basic paradigm: (starting with clean tree) checkout reset whole moves: HEAD moves: HEAD and branch updates: working + index updates: index result: clean result: working diff, nothing staged partial moves: nothing moves: nothing updates: working + index updates: index result: working diff, staged result: working diff, opposite change staged The basic consistencies are: - the partial operations don't move the HEAD or current branch in both cases; the whole operations do move HEAD or HEAD + branch. - whole or partial checkout updates working + index. - whole or partial reset updates index.