Well TIL after using git for 8 years. And yet 90% of the time what I'm typing is "git checkout --" which has nothing to do with the branch of the file, im just getting rid of something. It's a bad UI when the obscure case is favored over the common one, and believe me I can pick out 100 other cases.
This is interesting. I find myself using checkout to check out individual files extremely rarely. It feels like a bit of an anti-pattern to me. What I do instead is commit the changes I intend to keep, using some interactive form of commit (usually git gui) followed by git reset --hard to remove whatever I don't want to keep.
The underlying rule is never to make destructive changes on a working directory that also has changes I intend to keep. This massively reduces the risk of data loss by accidental fat fingering of a command.
