Detached git status line

24 Jun 2012

Detached git status line

It’s been a really long time since I posted about a prompt with git status support built in. I don’t care so much about svn these days, but something that has bothered me for quite a while about the default git status line is that it’s pretty useless if you aren’t at the tip of a branch. The default __git_ps1 function simply returns the sha of the current commit. It’s really unhelpful to simply see (abc1234...), especially when you’re doing a git bisect or something like that.

Instead of just using __git_ps1, you can spruce up your git prompt to tell you exactly where you are! Git knows that commit abc1234 is actually master~2 or feature_branch~25. Wouldn’t it be more helpful to see that?

After some agonizing, I’ve managed to glue together a couple of git commands that actually provide that extremely useful information. There was a minor bug that put “master” in the prompt if you had just created a new branch, but I got that fixed too.

Implemented in glorious, horrifying bash script, here is the somewhat more informative git prompt:

function parse_git_dirty {
  [[ $(git status 2> /dev/null | tail -n1) != "nothing to commit (working directory clean)" ]] && echo "⚡"
}

function parse_git_branch {
  local b="$(git branch --no-color 2> /dev/null | sed -e '/^[^*]/d' -e 's/^* //')"
  if [ -n "$b" ] && [ "$b" = "(no branch)" ]; then
    local b="$(git name-rev --name-only HEAD 2> /dev/null)"
  fi

  if [ -n "$b" ]; then
    printf "($b$(parse_git_dirty))"
  fi
}

export PS1='\[\033k\033\\\]\[\e[0;34m\][\u \w]$(parse_git_branch)\$\[\e[0;39m\] '

I’ve also posted this as a gist with some examples if you’d like to comment or fork my code.

André.Arko.net

Detached git status line