There’s a bash completion script somewhere in git’s contrib/ directory that has a more powerful function for showing the current branch in the prompt. For example, it can also tell you that you’re in the middle of a rebase.

“git checkout -b newbranch origin/newbranch” is a purely local operation. IOW: The remote’s branch is already available locally, in the remote tracking branch origin/newbranch. What the command does is just to create a local branch head from it (and it checks it out).

To actually get stuff that is not available locally yet, you need “git fetch” (defaults to “git fetch origin”).

And about “rebase”, that’s rewriting history. If you share that branch with others (e.g. by pushing it to some remote repo), using rebase is a generally a bad idea. See “RECOVERING FROM UPSTREAM REBASE” in git-rebase(1).

And “git branch -d -r origin/feature” also deletes your local remote tracking branch, not the branch that exists in the remote repository, for that you’d need “git push origin :feature”