All about "checkout" ?

Steve Kissh

I use SourceTree with Btibucket hosting a git repo.

What does the tool bar Checkout button checkout?

When I clone, is something automatically checkedout?

After making some changes to my working copy that I don't want to keep, should I just do another checkout to get the working copy back to the state before the changes?

When should I use the Clean checkbox in the lower left corner of Checkout tab? It says (discard all changes), but isn't that what checkout does, overwrites current working copy and therfore dicarding all changes?

Sumali

When cloning the default branch is checked out automatically which is usually master.

The main purpose of checkout is to switch a working copy between branches, if you want to remove modifications but not switch branches you might as well just use the reset button, both ways work really but pls note either way you will still have untracked files sitting around.

The "clean" checkbox makes it easier to change branches by removing all modifications first (because it actually runs a git reset --hard and then the checkout). I find it misleading because there's a git command called clean that does something different to what the "clean" checkbox does.