What is the difference between checkout and switch ?

checkout is the historic command and switch was introduced later. With time, checkout introduced many features that ended up confusing people. As a result switch was introduced to improve user experience.

switch has less features than checkout but it’s by design. It’s considered to be the safer command to use if all you want is to change from one branch to another.

An example of confusing feature is the restoring of file. If you made modifications to a file but decide it’s not worth it and you want to restore it to the last commit state, you can do so with checkout by doing :

git checkout -- myfile.md

however, switch doesn’t do that, it’s main purpose is to go from one branch to another. You would need to use restore :

git restore myfile.md

In the process we can say that it’s much cleaner as we’re avoiding a strange -- flag that was present for checkout