Copy files from another branch with Git

Welcome to the next pikoTutorial!

What's the problem?

Imagine that you are working on a feature branch called _targetbranch and someone else commits some folder to another feature branch called _sourcebranch. You need this folder, but these are completely different branches, with different changes and diverged history, so you can't just rebase or merge changes from _sourcebranch. Often in such situation I see people doing something like this:

• commit changes to _targetbranch
• checkout to _sourcebranch
• copy the required folder to some backup directory
• checkout to _targetbranch
• copy the required folder from the backup directory into the repository
• delete the required folder from the backup directory

How to make it faster?

All these 6 steps mentioned above may be executed with just a single Git command:

git checkout source_branch -- path/to/folder

After that, you should see the required folder on your branch.

Note for beginners: remember that the copied folder won't be automatically committed!