How to quickly checkout between git worktrees?

Question

I have the following file structure

❯ tree -L 1
.
├── latex/
├── main/
├── simulator/
├── tscnn/

Each directory is a worktree. If I am on latex/, trying to to check out to another worktree yields

❯ git checkout main
fatal: 'main' is already checked out at '/path/to/main'

I want to quickly checkout to another worktree (that is, cd to another directory) without explicitly writing the path (e.g., in the previous example, /path/to/main)

How to do so?

Answer 1

There is no way to do that with Git but possible with a shell function that'd use additional Unix tools. This works for me:

cd_worktree() {
    if [ $# -ne 1 ]; then
        echo "Usage: cd_worktree <branch>" >&2
        return 1
    fi
    path="$(git worktree list | grep -F "$1" | awk '{print $1}')"
    if [ -n "$path" ]; then
        cd "$path"
    else
        echo "Cannot find path for branch '$1'" >&2
        return 1
    fi
}

Usage:

cd_worktree main

For bash completion add this to your ~/.bashrc:

    _cd_worktree_comp() {
        local cur="${COMP_WORDS[COMP_CWORD]}"
        COMPREPLY=(`compgen -W "$(
            git worktree list | awk '{s=$3; gsub("[\\\\[\\\\]]", "", s); print s}'
        )" -- "$cur"`)
    }

    _cd_worktree_comp_loader() {
        _completion_loader git
        unset _cd_worktree_comp_loader
        complete -F _cd_worktree_comp cd_worktree
        return 124
    }

    complete -F _cd_worktree_comp_loader cd_worktree

It relies on _completion_loader from package bash-completion.