Git Branch Selector: implicit git pull to match remote branch

[Ansraer]

Summary

The branch selector in the git pane does not show some remote branches

Description

The git side pane's branch selector is not showing me all branches. So far I have only been able to reproduce this with remote branches, but that might very well be because I rarely need to switch to local ones.

I have performed a git fetch first and can indeed see the branch in question in other IDE's git integration (vs code, jet brains, ...). What makes this especially annoying is that one of the branches in question is my company's main dev branch (origin/dev).

Steps to reproduce:

1. Open the git pane
2. Git fetch
3. Open the branch selector
4. type in the name of the branch I want to check out (origin/dev)
5. don't find it

Expected Behavior:
The git branch selector shows all branches after a git fetch

Actual Behavior:
only some branches are shown, e.g. while origin/main (our stable branche) is available origin/dev (our dev branch) is not displayed.

Zed Version and System Specs

Zed: v0.203.5 (Zed)
OS: macOS 15.6.1
Memory: 24 GiB
Architecture: aarch64

[notpeter]

Does it show up if you search dev and not origin/dev?

I believe if you have a local branch (e.g. dev) which you have previously checked out, it will not display the branch with the origin prefix.

[Ansraer]

Huh, yes it does indeed show me a local dev branch.

the thing is that I wanted to explicitly check out the remote branch, since my local branch is horribly out of date. I only ever use it to create new branches.

[notpeter]

I believe I understand your intent: "switch branches to the current tip of origin/dev as the local branch dev" but there are some issues.

1. We don't want to show duplicate branches choices for any branch which has been previously checked out (by showing both dev and origin/dev) -- this would every branch you use would show up twice.
2. In the git cli git checkout origin/dev will always leave you in a detached head state and will never checkout a branch.

So basically we are attempting to show you remote branches which are available, but which you have not yet been checked out. And Zed does this by prefixing it with the remote name (e.g. origin).

In order to implement you're request, we would have to show both dev and origin/dev in the branch picker and the behavior would be subtly different depending on which you selected. dev == git checkout dev while origin/dev would be git checkout dev && git pull origin dev.

I'm not how we would implement a design which communicates the subtle difference between these two and there are some complications. If dev and origin/dev have diverged should Zed git pull --rebase, git pull --no-rebase, Ask?, or something else. I personally wouldn't want to implicitly rebase commits if I misclicked in the branch selector nor would I want to always prompt ("There are new commits on origin/main, would you like to pull, merge, abort or do nothing"), but I imagine preferences about that would vary.

I don't think this is something we could easily implement today without a bunch of design work. Thanks for filing!