One way to avoid having to specify which remote & branch you want to use when issuing pull & push commands in git is git checkout story_branch git branch --set-upstream-to=origin/story_branch

Now it will always push & pull from that ref

You can view these by looking in git's config file: vi .git/config

You will see a [branch story_branch] section where it will show you your configured remote and which branch it merges with. The way to read that section of config is:

for the branch 'story_branch' in the remote 'what is on the right hand side of = on the remote line' merge it into 'what is on the right hand side of = on the merge line' when no merge refspec is given