What is HEAD ?

HEAD is basically where you are located in the commit timeline in git. Or more precisely, it’s the pointer to the current branch.

Any time that you use the checkout (or switch) command to go from one branch to another, you’re basically changing the location of HEAD.

Normally HEAD points to a branch, such that the links between HEAD, branch and commit is as follow :

HEAD -> main -> commit ABC

HEAD can be what is called detached, which means it’s not pointing to a branch :

HEAD -> commit ABC

This can be interesting if you want to create a new branch in time after many commits were done, but you generally don’t want to stay in a detached state.