Okay, Git 2.30 doesn't really change "master" to "main", but it prints a big yellow deprecation warning: $ git init hint: Using 'master' as the name for the initial branch. This default branch name hint: is subject to change. To configure the initial branch name to use in all hint: of your new repositories, which will suppress this warning, call: hint: hint: git config --global init.defaultBranch hint: hint: Names commonly chosen instead of 'master' are 'main', 'trunk' and hint: 'development'. The just-created branch can be renamed via this command: hint: hint: git branch -m This is probably the best they can do in terms of a migration path. It works well for people who use Git on the command line. People using Git in IDEs, I don't know ... They might miss it. But what other options are there? Error out and *force* people to configure a default branch name? Hmmm.