git merge vs git pull

Over the years I have seen developers use two approaches to add code from one branch to another. For example, suppose you have two branches: "main" and "new-feature". You have been working on "new-feature" for a while and now you want to merge the changes you made into "main". To do this, developers generally use one of two ways:

1. Checkout the main branch and run git merge new-feature
2. Checkout the main branch and run git pull origin new-feature (This is the approach which is generally used when we create pull requests from the UI of various git hosting platforms (e.g. GitHub, GitLab, Bitbucket))

And I asked many people about this but no one seems to know the exact difference and they had just picked up one approach and been using it forever.

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Here's the difference -

git merge is used to merge a branch into the current branch, while git pull is used to fetch and merge changes from a remote repository into the current branch. In other words, git pull is a combination of git fetch and git merge. git fetch retrieves new commits from a remote repository, but does not merge them into the current branch. git merge is then used to integrate the changes from the remote branch into the local branch.