Git - Switching branches causes conflicts

When I'm on my develop branch and pull the latest, and then switch to a feature branch I get a bunch of merge conflicts despite there being no uncommitted changes.

What's even more strange is that the changes aren't coming from the develop branch, they seem to be from an old commit that's long gone and the files since changed a dozen times.

I have tried to keep the current branches changes and then merge the feature branch into develop, I thought this would resolve the conflict, but it happens again after the branches get merged.

It's because you have a file that is not tracked on your current branch but that is tracked on your other branch.

Type git status and you should notice there are untracked files.

This should not be a problem, as those files are usually kept when you switch branches: it's like if they weren't even noticed by Git.

Unfortunately, the branch you want to switch to has tracked that file and therefore will override it. As you could possibly lose some code by switching, Git prevents you from doing this action.

To solve this problem:

• If you don't care about the untracked files, delete them before switching.
• If you care about the untracked files and they need to be in the current branch, add and commit them before switching.
• If you care about the untracked files but don't want them in the current branch, use git stash to save them in a temporary branch that you can "paste" in another branch with git stash pop (look into it before doing it).