I started the mergetool ...
> git mergetool
And it said something like ...
merge tool candidates: blah blah blah
Merging:
file1.c
And then I thought, "You know, I'm not ready for this." Not knowing any clean way to shut it down, I hit ctrl-C. Now I want to check out another branch, but I can't ...
> git checkout other_branch
error: path 'file1.c' is unmerged
Is there some way to recover from this? I emphasize that I made no actual changes when mergetool was running.
You're looking for the --abort option which exists in most git commands:
git merge --abort
Manual entry:
Abort the current conflict resolution process, and try to reconstruct the pre-merge state.