Viewing Teammates Git Branches

The shortest way to see other’s branches is to go to GitHub and look at them there.

If you’re working in a team and want to see other people’s branches in your local site in VS Code then here are a few Git commands for the terminal that can help.

TL:DR

git fetch

Downloads all of the remote branches

git branch -r

shows the names of the remote branches

git checkout replace-with-name-of-remote

checks out a remote branch so you can see the files directly in VS Code.

Git Fetch

Fetch lets you download information on branches on the remote. You can use this to get the branches other people have made. Most of the time this works:

git fetch

You can also specify the name of the remote:

git fetch origin

This gets the branches and commits from origin which is usually the name of your GitHub repository. If you want to check whether you have a remote repository and what the name is you can type:

git remote

Note, you can also use git fetch all to fetch everything.

git fetch --all

Git Branch -r

After doing git fetch you can use git branch to see the remotes.

git branch -r

youcan also see all of the branches, both local on your computer and remote

git branch -a

git checkout <remotebranch>

Once you’ve fetched branches you can check them out. Usually you need git branch -r first to know what the name is.