Display your current git branch as part of your bash prompt | Hacker News Reader

Display your current git branch as part of your bash prompt

gist.github.com

32 pointskd5bjo21 comments

Cool! I've practically created my own framework in Bash to hack my prompt but I never thought about sharing it.

My prompt shows the git branch, svn revision, and active virtualenv ("workon" and "deactivate" are virtualenv commands in the screenshot below). Also, mine has COLORS! (Colors within the dynamic function are much harder than they sound)

Here's a quick screenshot: http://img.skitch.com/20090817-gtp7bgkmdn14j84ryhepa2edke.pn...

You can extend it pretty easily to show whatever you want by doing little more than adding another function. Throw this into ~/.profile if you want to try it: http://pastebin.com/f79a9af51

Emmett and I figured this out the other day at the request of one of our other engineers; I thought that some of you might be interested in it.

cool, thanks.

This is cool.. but how do I undo this?

You can set your prompt to whatever you want by running `export PS1=...`. What the default is depends on which version of unix you're running. Often, you can get your original prompt back by running `source ~/.bashrc`.

Barring that, logging out and back in will definitely fix it, as long as you didn't put it in one of your bash config files.

It's better to use a plumbing command for this sort of thing; git-completion.bash (http://git.kernel.org/?p=git/git.git;a=blob;f=contrib/comple...) has a thorough example. (The actual command called is 'git symbolic-ref HEAD'.)

That's definitely a lot more full-featured, but seems like overkill for what I was trying to do.

Had I known about `git symbolic-ref`, I might have used that instead of `git branch`. On the other hand, I would have needed to re-implement lots of what `git branch` does, such as detecting the difference between not being in a git repository and simply not being on a branch.

The interface of `git branch` seems stable enough that I doubt it will break this. If it does, it should take me no longer than 5 minutes to fix, since that's about how long it would take me to re-write the whole thing from scratch.

Is there any particular reason that using `git symbolic-ref` is better than `git branch` in this case, given that I want human-readable output, instead an unambiguous filesystem location?

Personally, I'd argue you do want to keep track of whether you are in a repo or not, since including that pipeline in your PS1 always forks three processes on every prompt. And if you're going to do that in your shell, it's good to have separate commands for each task.

For the case of not being on a branch, the output of 'git branch' is not very useful. I am currently using 'git name-rev --name-only HEAD', but the contrib script has an even fancier mechanism (via 'git describe') for coming up with something to display when HEAD isn't a symbolic ref.

Try this:

  export PS1='\w:$(__git_ps1 "%s")$ '

EDIT - here's mine btw:

  function parse_git_dirty {
    git diff --quiet HEAD &>/dev/null
    [[ $? == 1 ]] && echo "✎ " || echo "➜ "
  }
  function parse_git_branch {
    local branch=$(__git_ps1 "%s")
    [[ $branch ]] && echo "$branch$(parse_git_dirty)"
  }
  PS1='\u@\h $(parse_git_branch)\W $ '

If the branch has local changes it shows the pencil, in addition to the branch name. I'm still experimenting.

git-completion.bash has the added benefit of giving you tab-completion on git commands, and arguments to git commands.

It also shows the correct state of merge/rebase in the prompt as well. In many distributions, it's installed as /etc/bash_completion.d/git when you install git from a package management system, you just need to source /etc/bash_completion to get all the benefits.

The OP is an example of wheel reinvented, poorly.

zsh does a much better job (with its right prompts and formatting) http://img194.imageshack.us/img194/2101/zsh1.png - this actually shows a git repository imported from svn

http://img40.imageshack.us/img40/3738/zsh2.png - this shows a regular svn repo

This is what you need in your zshrc

# precmd is called just before the prompt is printed function precmd() { title “zsh” “$USER@%m” “%55<…<%~” psvar=() vcs_info [[ -n $vcs_info_msg_0_ ]] && psvar[1]=”$vcs_info_msg_0_” }

vcs_info export RPS1=”${YELLOW}%1v${NORM}”

Isn't this also in a public github guide? http://github.com/guides/put-your-git-branch-name-in-your-sh...

Been using it for a while now. ;-)

Funny, I wrote this .bash_profile script (http://gist.github.com/168286) just the other day because I wanted... 1) Minimalist colors 2) Stripped down CLEAN prompt 3) For GIT folders it will display the current branch.

It was based on this which I thought was too ugly: http://www.simplisticcomplexity.com/2008/03/13/show-your-git...

Also, if you use git+github+capistrano, I wrote a bash script where you type "tap" and it will add all new files, commit, push to github. If you type "tap /d" it will also cap deploy it to the server and reload in nginx passenger. For small projects I'll push something and then have to make a small change. Now I can just edit the file in textmate and can add-commit-push-deploy with one command.

http://gist.github.com/168589

I use Ryan Tomayko's git-sh, a "git mode" for Bash that includes the branch in the prompt, and also adds the most common git commands as top-level commands (so you can type "checkout master" instead of "git checkout master"):

http://github.com/rtomayko/git-sh/tree/master

I reworked this script to show your branch name in green if the branch is clean and red if the branch is dirty. Personal preference but I prefer the visual color distinction denoting branch state.

http://gist.github.com/120804

I liked this but it really slowed things down. Perhaps because my home folder etc are all on nfs shares?

Totally do this; I can't live without it.

Also, display your current branch in mercurial repos: http://stevelosh.com/blog/entry/2009/3/17/mercurial-bash-pro...

You have not seen git-prompt yet. How about forgetting that there is git-status? See http://volnitsky.com/project/git-prompt And it will do svn, hg and a lot of other stuff.

Leonid Volnitsky's git-prompt is the best git-enabled Bash script I've found.

http://github.com/lvv/git-prompt/tree/master

It's by default in msysgit bash.

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