git-prompt a native git prompt status tool

This project aims to provide a fast, informative string to be incorporated into your shell prompt. With this in mind git-prompt is written in C and uses the libgit2 library, enabling robust, visible, repository status discovery without slowing down your shell.

Installation

To install git-prompt for use from the command line or, most likely, for integration with your terminal prompt run the following commands:

git clone --recursive https://github.com/kbenzie/git-prompt.git # --recursive is necessary include libgit2 which is a project submodule and dependency.
cd git-prompt/
cmake install .
make

Then simply add git-prompt to your $PATH.

The ability to compile and link against the system version of libgit2 has yet to be added.

Options

To view the current set of options git-prompt can be invoked from the command line using the -h or --help flags. At the time of writing the following output is produced.

Usage: git-prompt <options>

Options:
    -h --help         Show this help dialogue
    --submodules      Enable submodule status updates
    --debug           Enable debug output
    prefix "("        Change the prefix token to '('
    suffix ")"        Change the suffix token to ')'
    branch ""         Change the branch token to ''
    nohead "∅"        Change the nohead token to '∅'
    separator "|"     Change the separator token to '|'
    staged "●"        Change the staged token to '●'
    conflicts "×"     Change the conflicts token to '×'
    changed "+"       Change the changed token to '+'
    clean "✓"         Change the clean token to '✓'
    untracked "…"     Change the untracked token to '…'
    ahead "↓"         Change the ahead token to '↓'
    behind "↑"        Change the behind token to '↑'

Usage

At the time of writing the following configurations have only been tested with zsh on OS X, however there should be no reason that git-prompt would not work equally as well on Linux or with another shell, as long as the appropriate escape codes are used to maintain a correct prompt length.

The following is a basic example of using git-prompt with the default settings which aim to be relatively sane.

git_prompt() {
  prompt=`git-prompt`
  echo "$prompt"
}

PS1='$(git_prompt) '

Here's an example of my prompt which adds color, adding extra meaning, to most elements of the git-prompt output.

git_prompt() {
  echo `git-prompt \
    prefix '' \
    suffix '%{\e[1;0m%}' \
    branch '%{\e[1;35m%}' \
    separator ' ' \
    staged '%{\e[0;32m%}*' \
    conflicts '%{\e[1;31m%}×' \
    changed '%{\e[0;31m%}+' \
    clean '%{\e[0;32m%}✓' \
    untracked '%{\e[0;31m%}…' \
    ahead '%{\e[1;0m%}↑' \
    behind '%{\e[1;0m%}↓'`
}

PS1='[%{$fg_bold[white]%}%D{%H:%M:%S}%{$reset_color%}] %{$fg_bold[green]%}%n%{${reset_color}%} «%{$fg_bold[blue]%}%~%{$reset_color%} $(git_prompt)» '