Recently  I tried to merge some changes I had made on another branch back into my master branch, but Xcode wouldn’t let me. Spurious error messages prevented this from happening. I was happy to simply create a new master branch and overwrite it completely with the changes I had implemented on my former testing branch.

Turns out that Xcode is happy to create new git branches for our projects and screw them up several times in a row, but sadly, it is not capable of deleting branches.

So the simple answer to the title of this post is: it can’t be done!

However, a quick command in Terminal can do it for is. cd into your local project directory and issue the following:

where “yourbranch” is of course the name of your branch. Make sure you’re not currently on the branch you try to delete.

Doing this allowed me to simply create a new branch using Source Control – New Branch. When we do that, Xcode will automatically use the contents of our current branch as a starting point for the new branch and switch us onto it immediately.