Git is the most advanced and flexible version control system in existence. Truthfully, it is a complete filesystem built on top of your existing filesystem. It's perfectly suited for anything involving text, and makes large scale or extremely frequent edits a breeze. No fuss about backups; if you make a mistake in editing you can just check the file back out from git and you're all set.

Switching between branches is a very common action with git, and the repo that I forked this repository from had a much simpler version of code, which would simply allow you to display the name of the currently checked out branch in your command line prompt.

I went a little further than that. For me, although I do switch branches frequently, the real action I'm doing is editing files. The reason that I personally need to run git status frequently is not to see what branch I'm on so much as to see which files I've modified, whether I've staged the modifications to be committed, whether I've created any new files that are as of yet untracked by git, etc. I wanted a prompt that could display all of that information at a glance--color coded.

That's what I've created here.

There are a few caveats with regard to extremely advanced states that you may get into (merge in progress, rebase in progress, possibly cherry-pick in progress, etc). These are mentioned briefly below. They're rather difficult to parse from the git status --porcelain command, though-- actually most of these special states aren't even indicated in any way by git status --porcelain--so I've ignored these for the most part.

The basic table of colors that will be shown is:

• blue - clean working directory, nothing to commit
• green - changes have been staged but not committed
• red - changes have been made in the working directory but not staged
• yellow - there are changes in the index and further changes in the working directory

If there are untracked files in your working directory, a bold white asterisk will be added after the branch name for any of the above statuses.

And, of course, if you're not in a git repository your prompt will work as it normally does.

Note that this makes for a total of 8 options. I've separated these fairly cleanly in the code, so feel free to tweak them to your preference.

Note that there are some edge cases if a merge is in progress, which are difficult to parse. Therefore in most cases if you are merging, the branch name will appear in purple followed by the word "merging", but in certain advanced scenarios (i.e. stopping during an interactive rebase to edit a commit, or performing a nonconflicting merge with --no-commit) you will simply have to use the 'git status' command to get a proper explanation of what's going on. I can't do everything. :)

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

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

Edit your ~/.bash_profile or ~/.profile and add the following to the top:

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

My own preference is to have all related data in a single file. I could use colors.sh by itself, but since I only use it for this script, I have made a standalone version of all the code from this repo, standalone_prompt.sh, which can be sourced by itself and will work with no layers of indirection. For actual installation you may want to comment out the line in the standalone prompt file which sets your PS1 variable and set it yourself in your .bashrc or .bash_profile.

Once installed, just include $git_prompt in your PS1 environment variable at the point you want the colorized git branch to be displayed.

Default prompt from Apple:

PS1='\h:\W \u\$ '

Prompt customized to include git branch information:

PS1='\h:\W \u$git_prompt\$ '

The prompt I use on my Mac:

PS1='\t [\u \W]$git_prompt \! \$ '