I have been using git for a while and am comfortable with most of the operations, push, pulls, merges, branches, forks, etc.
My question is about "When I clone a repository, I get a copy of all of the code, including all branches" which I think is true.
However, what happens when someone else makes a branch and then pushes that branch to github - just the unmerged branch that is. Will I not "get" this new branch unless I specifically git pull it by name of branch? That is how it seems. If I started from scratch and cloned the whole repository again, would that mean I would get the new branch? My key question is - how do I know what other branches exist. That is, although I may personally "know" the branch name from the developer, what if I don't - how does my "local" git clone know about new branch names? Is it when I git pull origin master that I get the names of new branches and then I have to git pull origin [new_branch_name] using new_branch_name from the list that master has?
How do I know the names of new branches on the remote?
git fetch will download any updates for your repo, including new branches.
The output for the fetch command will indicate that new branches are being/have been downloaded.
You can then use git branch -r to see the list of remote branches that are available. You will not see the new branches in this output unless you have done the fetch command first.