Cleaning up merged branches

Sync main and remove the now-stale local feature branch after the user merges a PR on GitHub. This repo squash-merges PRs by default, so the plain git branch -d refuses to delete the branch — verify the content actually landed in main, then force-delete.

Steps

1. Fetch, prune stale remote-tracking refs, and note the current branch: git fetch origin --prune && git branch --show-current
2. Switch to main and pull the merge (local main still points at the pre-merge commit until you do this): git checkout main && git pull origin main
3. Try the safe delete of the feature branch: git branch -d <branch>
   • Succeeds → done; go to Verify.
   • Fails with error: the branch '<branch>' is not fully merged → expected for a squash merge. GitHub squashed the branch into one new commit, so its original commits are not ancestors of main even though the content landed. Continue.
4. Confirm the branch's content is fully in main before force-deleting. The ':!.blume' pathspec excludes local .blume/ tool artifacts that are never committed: git diff main <branch> -- . ':!.blume'
   • Empty output → content is fully in main; safe to force-delete.
   • Non-empty output → the branch has unmerged changes. Stop, show the diff to the user, and do NOT force-delete.
5. Force-delete the redundant local branch: git branch -D <branch>

Verify

• git branch shows the feature branch is gone and you are on main.
• git log --oneline -1 shows main at the squash-merge commit.

Gotchas

• Deleting multiple branches at once: zsh does not word-split an unquoted variable (unlike bash), so git branch -D $branches passes the whole list as one bad refspec and deletes nothing. Pipe the list through xargs instead: ... | xargs git branch -D.
• Deleting remote branches (git push origin --delete <branch>) is externally visible — confirm with the user first. Local cleanup above does not require it; git fetch origin --prune already drops stale remote-tracking refs.