Hi @PhotonQuantum, can you clarify a little more about your workflow? What do you do after git merge temp? Do you git push the main branch? Or, for example, do you use the branch to open a code review for others to see?

I think there's two parts of your problem which have to be addressed:

• How do I sync my changes with the latest main, without branches?
• How do I push the updated code, without branches?

For syncing, git-branchless provides the git sync command, which will rebase your stacks on top of the main branch. Note that it does a rebase rather than a merge.

If you want to do a merge, you can also just do it the other way, and write git merge main while you're on your commit.

Or, you can run git switch main and then git merge abc123, where abc123 is the commit hash in question. (Usually I just copy and paste the hash from git sl.)

For pushing, you could just run git sync and then git branch -f main to forcibly update the main branch to the current commit, then git push it. (Or git branch -f main abc123 to set it to an arbitrary commit.)

I personally don't use a local main branch at all, and I just work using origin/main. In those cases, if I want to push a commit, I run git sync and then git push origin HEAD:main, which means "push the HEAD commit and set the remote main to that".

If you're using a service which requires you to have a branch name, then there's not much you can do about that. I usually do git checkout -b temp or git checkout -b temp abc123 and then gh pr create to invoke the Github CLI to create a PR for that branch. Unfortunately, the gh command doesn't offer a way of creating a PR without having the branch in question checked out.

UPDATE: I recently learned that git checkout -B <branch> <target> will forcibly move the branch <branch> and check out <target> as a single operation.

UPDATE: gh does let you create a PR without having the branch checked out, using the --head option. However, you must first manually push the branch to the remote.