I mostly develop in Visual Studio, but I run all my git commands in Git Bash (except for view history and looking at commits). Today I accidentally clicked on the branch selector at the bottom right of Visual Studio and changed the branch. I didn't even know what branch I had selected, until I saw it start the checkout process and was dismayed to see "Checking out files (100/52,000)". I had accidentally selected a very old branch. I thought for a moment and decided I probably should just let it finish, which is what I did, and then I switched back when it was done. This set me back more than 5 minutes.
Is there something better I could have done as soon as I realized it? Visual Studio (2017) pretty much locks up at that point. I know I could have killed VS, but I was concerned about what state I would have left my repo in had I done that.
If just waiting it out is the best option, had I checked out an old branch from the command line instead (say, in git bash), would the answer be any different?