Move unpublished commits on master to new branch

[saraford]

I cannot remember to create a branch first before I start making commits on master. I'll get halfway through whatever edits and I'm like "d'oh! I forgot a branch" so I can either try to remember my cheatsheet list of git commands to get my changes back to a branch, or what I honestly do is ctrl-c, ctrl-v, do a reset --hard, and then (if I'm lucky) create the branch, and then put my changes back.

What I want is something that will take whatever commits I have locally and move those commits to a new branch and leave the remote untouched.

[saraford]

I need this.
http://ohshitgit.com/#accidental-commit-master

[niik]

We've discussed various ways of addressing this in the past and I think it's a really interesting area for improvement.

I think at the very least we should show a warning when committing straight to master with the option of creating a branch. We've also discussed supporting the scenario you describe of being able to bring commits out of master and resetting it to the origin branch. That path has a whole lot of edge-cases though so I'd really prefer it if we could prevent these "accidents" from happening in the first place.

That said I think we're pretty full for beta and possibly 1.0 as well but this is a great feature that I want for us to get in at some point.

[shiftkey]

I still want to call this feature "New Branch, Maybe?" and ensure it's pronounced like "Call Me, Maybe?", but this came up at our mini-summit and is an idea we want to revisit. Stay tuned for more details.

[billygriffin]

From @nerdneha in #4647:

As a user, before I accidentally made a bunch of commits on the wrong branch (ex: protected or master), I want the app to warn me and guide my commits to a new branch so that I don't have to use command line magic to get them to a new branch or reset my work and risk losing everything.

Just want to call out that there are a couple use cases here to potentially differentiate:

1. Master branch -> new branch
2. Protected branch -> unprotected branch

[billygriffin]

I'm going to roll #3633 into this issue, as I think there's an opportunity to take a more holistic look at branch protections and understanding people's workflows there.

[billygriffin]

Closing this issue in favor of #7023.