And one more quote from the same stack overflow answer, “it will still allow you to make commits (which will update HEAD), so the above short definition is still true if you think of a detached HEAD as a temporary branch without a name.”

What? We can still make commits? in a detached HEAD state?

Let’s be brave and give it a try in the visualization tool.

If we do a ‘git commit’ in the detached HEAD state, the visualization tools shows a commit being made to the side.

P.S. Have I proclaimed my love of this git visualization tool yet today?

So what on earth now? we have this thing floating out in nowhere. Well, we know it is a nameless branch… and we know we can merge branches… let’s try to merge it!

First, we’ll checkout master.

Then we’ll do the merge and verify the git log.

and thus conclude my mathematical proof I truly have no idea how people are able to keep track of these one-off commits or whatever is going on in git without visualization tools. QED.

My learning preference is through hands-on experimentation. I like taking things apart, putting them back together, or trying to break stuff. So let’s break apart this HEAD thingy.

According to this SO answer, it is a file.

saraf@TheBlueDog  ~/Source/Repos/scrap/detachedHeadPractice (master)
$ cat .git/HEAD
ref: refs/heads/master

and that file contains some content. I’d assume “ref” means reference, and “master” is the master branch we’ve been playing with. I’m not sure what “refs/heads/master” actually stands for, but I’ll figure that out later.

I keep hearing HEAD referred to as a pointer. This would make sense if it is a file that only contains the location(?) where to point to. That answers the literal question.

But what does the HEAD pointer do?

According to this stack overflow answer, “HEAD is a reference to the last commit in the currently checked-out branch.” Considering we have master checked out, that makes sense. Doing a git log would show all the commits in the repo.  If we switched to a branch and did a git log, we’d see all the commits for that branch.

But what about the detached HEAD state from yesterday?

Continuing with the same stack overflow answer, “A detached HEAD is the situation you end up in whenever you check out a commit (or tag) instead of a branch.”

Yep, we saw that yesterday. HEAD is pointing at the 2nd commit, whereas master is pointing at the 3rd.

 

Now I had to re-read this line from the same stack overflow answer, “In this case, you have to imagine this as a temporary branch without a name; so instead of having a named branch reference, we only have HEAD.”

A temporary branch without a name??

Okay, what I think is happening is that if you were in a detached state (as shown above) and did a git log, you’d only see 2 commits, not 3.  Since you are seeing 2 commits, you are still technically on a branch. It’s just that this branch doesn’t have a name.

In other words, a Git pointer never points to just a single commit. A git pointer points to the last commit in that series of commits (which I guess is where the temporary nameless branch concept comes from). Which now begs the question… what’s really a git branch?