I use git worktrees daily. I'm surprised by how hard it can be to explain them to people who have never used them. Lately I've settled on "like clones, but sharing a .git directory." The article tries to get this across by comparing them to branches, but I think clones are a more intuitive concept to compare against.

To solve some of the ergonomics issues (command verbosity, manual commands to copy over .env files and install dependencies), I wrote autowt, which is a lightweight but powerful worktree manager: https://steveasleep.com/autowt/

Once I dialed in the cli experience, I basically stopped typing 'git checkout <branch>' to change tasks, because it's easier to ignore working directory state when flipping between tasks.

Fossil SCM, conventionally, has been thus way by default.

https://fossil-scm.org/home/doc/trunk/www/gitusers.md

wt is a useful little tool for helping with git worktrees: https://github.com/timvw/wt

I use it's config to copy in some non-repo config and then hooks to start an agent doing analysis.

The one real caveat to this is that if your application has particularly heavy cold starts it can be hard to actually run your worktrees. I usually end up swapping to a regular checkout as each worktree is due for hands-on attention.

This is very interesting and could be very helpful for A/B testing or comparing outputs/speed between 2 branches.

I already know a place I want to use this.

I do the same thing just checking out the repo multiple times in different directories.

I'm not really sure what worktrees adds on top of that.

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What a peculiar title. The title suggest parallel dev without using worktrees, but the article is about using worktrees.