Branch Lifecycle

gs delete

Delete a branch and its metadata from the stack. Children are reparented to the deleted branch's parent and restacked.

# Interactive selection of branch to delete
gs delete
 
# Delete specific branch
gs delete feat-old
 
# Delete without confirmation
gs delete -f feat-old
 
# Short aliases
gs d feat-old
gs rm feat-old

Flags: -f, --force — delete without confirmation

Aliases: d, remove, rm

When to use:

• Removing completed or abandoned feature branches
• Cleaning up your stack after merging to trunk
• Restructuring your stack by removing intermediate branches

gs move

Rebase the current branch onto a different parent. Descendants are automatically restacked.

# Interactive selection of target branch
gs move
 
# Move current branch onto feat-base
gs move feat-base
 
# Using --onto flag
gs move -o feat-base
 
# Short alias
gs mv feat-base

Flags: -o, --onto — specify target branch

Alias: mv

What it does:

• Changes the parent of the current branch
• Rebases the current branch onto the new parent
• Automatically restacks all children branches
• Prevents circular dependencies (won't move onto descendants)

When to use:

• Reorganizing your stack structure
• Moving a feature branch to depend on a different parent
• Extracting a branch from one stack to another

gs fold

Fold the current branch's changes into its parent. Squash-merges the commits, reparents children, and deletes the branch.

# Fold current branch into parent
gs fold
 
# Keep current branch instead of deleting it
gs fold --keep
 
# Skip confirmation prompt
gs fold --force
gs fold -f

Flags:

When to use:

• When a branch should have been part of its parent
• Simplifying a stack by collapsing intermediate branches
• Combining multiple small changes into a single branch

gs rename

Rename the current branch. All metadata references are updated automatically.

gs rename feat-auth-v2

When to use:

• Before submitting a PR with a better name
• Fixing naming conventions