For the longest time I’d had the frustration of working on one branch, needing to create another branch for a bug fix, then creating a PR with this bug fix only to discover all the commits from the original branch are now in the PR.
Today I discovered you can actually specify the base branch in the git checkout command. Simply do this:
git checkout -b newbranch master
It will create and switch to the new branch basing it off master. I’ve created a new script called ‘gnb’ (for ‘git new branch’) to do this all the time for me now. You can see it here
Also if you’ve already submitted the PR and now want to remove those additional commits you can easily do this by rebasing your new branch off master.
git rebase --onto master originalbranch newbranch
git push origin +newbranch # Force push as we're re-writing history here
This will rebase all the commits you did in newbranch onto master skipping commits that are in originalbranch.