View a file in a different Git branch without changing branches

Question

Is it possible to open a file in a git branch without checking out that branch? How?

Essentially I want to be able to open a file in my GitHub pages branch without switching branches all the time. I don't want to modify it, just want to view it.

Answer 1

The following command will do

$ git show branch:file

Here, branch can be any ref (branch, tag, HEAD, ...) and file is the full path of the file. In order to export it you could use

$ git show branch:file > exported_file