It seems like you were trying to create a whole new independent project (I will call it copy) based off one of your other projects (I will call it original).

If copy is supposed to be a brand-new project with a new history that starts with the current (renamed) content of original, then you need to delete the hidden folder .git from copy‘s working directory, initialize a new repository with git init, stage and commit the current content, create a new repository on GitHub for copy, add the new remote to copy with git add remote origin <copy_url>, and finally push to the remote.

Instead, if copy is supposed to be a parallel project of original and retain original‘s history, then you could create a fork. To do that, go to original‘s repository on GitHub, click on the fork arrow, select Create a new fork, and clone the newly created repo. The cloned repository (copy) will already point to the new remote, and all the changes committed to it won’t affect original, unless a PR from copy to original is performed.

Lastly,

went to the command line to try to delete the local git repository with git branch –delete master

a branch represents only a line of development. It is not your repository, even if this is your main line of development. If you want to delete a repository along with its history of changes, you need to delete the hidden folder .git in the project’s working directory.

Also, you cannot delete your currently checked out branch, you need to select a different branch to delete the current one. Furthermore, you can only delete branches whose changes are included in the current branch, unless you perform a forced deletion.

git branch --delete master likely failed because you currently have the master branch checked out, and git will not allow you to delete the branch you are currently working from.

From your question however, I assume you didn’t want to delete the branch but rather remove git from the local repository itself.

If, as you described, you have a new remote (GitHub) repository created, you don’t have to “delete” or “remove” anything, you can simply change the remote origin of the your local git repository:

git remote set-url origin <url to your remote (GitHub) repository>

From there pushing the local repository to origin will push to the new remote repository you’ve set up:

git add .
git commit
git push origin master

(*note: depending on the state of your new remote repository, you may have to address merge conflicts or git push --force origin master.)

If you do want to delete git from the local repository: Everything related to git is contained in the .git directory of your local repositry. If you simply rm -rf .git/ from the root directory of your local repository, it will no longer be seen as a git repository. If you do this via the command line or otherwise, VS Code will automatically recognize that the directory is no longer a git repository.