If you ever hesitate whether you should buy a crazy expensive trans-atlantic plane ticket, shift your biological clock by 6 hours for just a three day stay, miss a meeting of your research group and reschedule another one:

When using git, I sometimes want to fast-forward some branchA, but currently I’m on branchB. The simplest way to do this is to checkout branchA, do a pull (or another command to fast-forward branchA), and then to checkout branchB again.

However, when switching branches, git modifies my source files, so when I’m back on branchB and recompile, make will think many files changed, and the recompilation might take a long time.

So it would be nice to fast-forward branches without checking them out, and here’s how to do it.

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I’m currently working on setting up a website and blog with Jekyll and Github pages.

As you can see, it is far from finished!