Is it good practice to use the xor operator for boolean checks?

I find that I have similar conversations a lot. On the one hand, you have a compact, efficient method of achieving your goal. On the other hand, you have something that the rest of your team might not understand, making it hard to maintain in the future.

My general rule is to ask if the technique being used is something that it is reasonable to expect programmers in general to know. In this case, I think that it is reasonable to expect programmers to know how to use boolean operators, so using xor in an if statement is okay.

As an example of something that wouldn't be okay, take the trick of using xor to swap two variables without using a temporary variable. That is a trick that I wouldn't expect everybody to be familiar with, so it wouldn't pass code review.

I think it'd be okay if you commented it, e.g. // ^ == XOR.

I think you've answered your own question - if you get strange looks from people, it's probably safer to go with the more explicit option.

If you need to comment it, then you're probably better off replacing it with the more verbose version and not making people ask the question in the first place.

You can simply use != instead.