None of these answers helped me because I still had untracked files even after reset and stash. I had to do:

git reset --hard HEAD
git clean -d -f

git checkout -f your_branch_name

git checkout -f your_branch_name

if you have troubles reverting changes:

git checkout .

if you want to remove untracked directories and files:

git clean -fd

Follow these steps:

1. Git stash save will save all your changes even if you switch between branches.

git stash save

2. Git checkout any other branch, now since you saved your changes you can move around any branch. The above command will make sure that your changes are saved.

git checkout branch

3. Now when you come back to the branch use this command to get all your changes back.

git stash pop

Easy Answer:

is to force checkout a branch

git checkout -f <branch_name>

Force checking out a branch is telling git to drop all changes you've made in the current branch, and checkout out the desired one.

or in case you're checking out a commit

git checkout -f <commit-hash>

"thought that I could change branches without committing. If so, how can I set this up? If not, how do I get out of this problem?"

The answer to that is No, that's literally the philosophy of Git that you keep track of all changes, and that each node (i.e. commit) has to be up-to-date with the latest changes you've made, unless you've made a new commit of course.

You decided to keep changes?

Then stash them using

git stash

and then to unstash your changes in the desired branch, use

git stash apply

which will apply you changes but keep them in the stash queue too. If you don't want to keep them in the stash stack, then pop them using

git stash pop

That's the equivalent of apply and then drop

If you want to keep the changes and change the branch in a single line command

git stash && git checkout <branch_name> && git stash pop

Move uncommited changes to a new branch

I created a .gitconfig alias for this:

[alias]
spcosp = !"git stash push && git checkout \"$@\" && git stash pop --index #"

To change to new-branch-name, use:

git spcosp new-branch-name

And any non-commited file and index changes will be kept.

For your mental calmness (to have much easier access to changes you have left uncomitted doing a branch switch)

Before switching:

git checkout <next_branch>

use

git stash save "brief description of changes"

instead of the default:

git stash    
// or
git stash save

This pays off if your git stash list is a longer list and must switch back to some previous idea started somewhere there.

To switch to other branch without committing the changes when git stash doesn't work. You can use the below command:

git checkout -f branch-name