Git Aware Prompt

Working with Git and its great branching/merging features is amazing. Constantly switching branches can be confusing though as you have to run git status to see which branch you're currently on.

The solution to this is to have your terminal prompt display the current branch. There are a number of articles available online about how to achieve this. This project is an attempt to make an easy to install/configure solution.

Overview

If you cd to a Git working directory, you will see the current Git branch name displayed in your terminal prompt. When you're not in a Git working directory, your prompt works like normal.

This fork by joeytwiddle also:

• shows you how far your local branch is ahead or behind the repository's branch
• shows how many files are staged
• indicates when the top stash entry was based on the current commit or branch
• adds a timeout for slower machines so that you will get your prompt quickly, even if git status is taking too long to retrieve the dirty and staged stats. (Tested in bash and zsh.)

If you only want the ahead/behind marks (no timeout and no staged stats), you may prefer the branch ahead_behind or if you are curious about the code, see ahead_behind_simple (compare).

<3 indicates that the local branch is 3 commits behind the upstream/remote branch, and could be updated.

*2 indicates that the branch is now dirty, with 2 files modified but not committed.

>1 indicates that the local branch has 1 commit which has not yet been pushed.

+1 would indicate that you have staged 1 file before comitting, but that is not shown above.

?4 would indicate that there are 4 untracked files in the tree, also not shown.

# indicates that git status was taking too long, so dirty * staged + and untracked ? markers will not be shown this time. git status will continue running in the background, so after a few moments, hitting <Enter> again should give you an up-to-date summary.

(s) is a reminder that the top stash was made on the current branch, or the current commit.

The symbols (or "markers") can be changed by editing the prompt.sh file directly (and reloading it of course). The numbers or the markers can be omitted by removing the _count or _mark variables from the PS1 prompt below.

See Also

• The original git-aware-prompt by jimeh

• The prompt now distributed with git offers a GIT_PS1_SHOWUPSTREAM option.

• Oh-my-zsh also has its own git-prompt. (It has 500 lines compared to our 200.)

• Inspiration for this fork came from git-branch-status by jehiah

Installation

Clone the project to a .bash folder in your home directory:

mkdir ~/.bash
cd ~/.bash
git clone git://github.com/joeytwiddle/git-aware-prompt.git

Edit your ~/.bash_profile or ~/.profile or ~/.bashrc (for Ubuntu) and add the following to the top:

export GITAWAREPROMPT=~/.bash/git-aware-prompt
source "${GITAWAREPROMPT}/main.sh"

Configuring

Once installed, there will be new $git_branch and $git_dirty variables available to use in the PS1 environment variable, along with a number of color helper variables which you can see a list of in colors.sh.

If you want to know more about how to customize your prompt, I recommend this article: How to: Change / Setup bash custom prompt (PS1)

Suggested Prompts

Below are a few suggested prompt configurations. Simply paste the code at the end of the same file you pasted the installation code into earlier.

Mac OS X

export PS1="\u@\h \W\[$txtcyn\]\$git_branch\[$bldgrn\]\$git_ahead_mark\$git_ahead_count\[$txtrst\]\[$bldred\]\$git_behind_mark\$git_behind_count\[$txtrst\]\[$bldylw\]\$git_stash_mark\[$txtrst\]\[$txtylw\]\$git_dirty\$git_dirty_count\[$txtrst\]\$ "

Optionally, if you want a nice pretty prompt when using sudo -s, also add this line:

export SUDO_PS1="\[$bakred\]\u@\h\[$txtrst\]\w\$ "

Ubuntu

Standard:

export PS1="\${debian_chroot:+(\$debian_chroot)}\u@\h:\w\[$txtcyn\]\$git_branch\[$bldgrn\]\$git_ahead_mark\$git_ahead_count\[$txtrst\]\[$bldred\]\$git_behind_mark\$git_behind_count\[$txtrst\]\[$bldyellow\]\$git_stash_mark\[$txtrst\]\[$txtylw\]\$git_dirty\$git_dirty_count\[$txtrst\]\$ "

Colorized:

export PS1="\${debian_chroot:+(\$debian_chroot)}\[\033[01;32m\]\u@\h\[\033[00m\]:\[\033[01;34m\]\w\[\033[00m\]\[$txtcyn\]\$git_branch\[$bldgrn\]\$git_ahead_mark\$git_ahead_count\[$txtrst\]\[$bldred\]\$git_behind_mark\$git_behind_count\[$txtrst\]\[$bldyellow\]\$git_stash_mark\[$txtrst\]\[$txtylw\]\$git_dirty\$git_dirty_count\[$txtrst\]\$ "

Updating

Assuming you followed the default installation instructions and cloned this repo to ~/.bash/git-aware-prompt:

cd ~/.bash/git-aware-prompt
git pull

Usage Tips

To view other user's tips, please check the Usage Tips wiki page. Or if you have tips of your own, feel free to add them :)

License

CC0 1.0 Universal