This sounds so simple, but I just can't figure it out. I made an experimental branch a while ago, and now I'd like to pull in all the changes that happened on master since I made it. This is all local. I want to pull from local master into local my_branch, but I can't do it. This doesn't seem to work, telling me that master isn't a git repository:

git pull master

You have to tell Git from where to pull, in this case from the current directory/repository (.):

git pull . master

But when working locally, you can simply use merge (pull internally calls merge):

git merge master