Clean up accidental commit on Main or Master and moving changes to a new branch using Git

Summary

I accidentally committed to main or master without creating a branch first. I did not push the changes to the repository, only committed locally.

Problem

Made changes on main/master and ran the following command:

git commit -a

Solution

To fix this, run:

git reset --soft HEAD^

then

git stash

Create the branch:

git checkout -b the_branch_I_wanted

Apply the stashed changes:

git stash pop

Now commit:

git commit -a

Reference

Stack Overflow - How to uncommit my last commit in Git