Difference between checkout existing and checkout new branch in Sourcetree

Question

In sourcetree I would like to just check out to the remote develop branch so I can start a new feature branch in there. I'm currently in another feature branch in which I have committed and pushed all my changes.

However when I right click on remote branch origin/develop I get this:

For some reason I can find nowhere what is the difference here. I don't want to break the repo at my new job, so I'm super careful. In GitKraken you just checkout to remote and update your local develop branch if necessary.

Answer 1

What this does is:

git checkout -b develop --track origin/develop

That will make sure the local branch develop will push to, by default, the remote branch origin/develop.

Note that with Git 2.23+, that would be git switch

git switch -c develop --track origin/develop

SourceTree has not yet integrated that new command.

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I don't want to break the repo at my new job, so I'm super careful

That won't break anything: this is a local operation only.

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This differ from "Checkout existing", which will only list existing local or remote branches, making it the equivalent of:

git switch <branch>