If you use Git from a command line interface you probably find yourself typing ‘git status’ and ‘git branch -a’ way too many times a day. The public Git repository has a great set of tools that can be enabled post installation. I’ve found the most useful to be the Bash shell extensions used for displaying the current branch and repository status directly in the PS1 prompt. These three environment variables save me hundreds of typed characters a day:

GIT_PS1_SHOWDIRTYSTATE=1
GIT_PS1_SHOWUPSTREAM=”auto”
GIT_PS1_SHOWUNTRACKEDFILES=1

With these set in your .bash_profile script anytime you change into a Git repository directory, additional information about the state of that repository is automatically appended to the prompt. If simply setting these variables doesn’t work copy the /git/contrib/completion/git-completion.bash file to your home directory and source it in your .bash_profile.

After entering a Git repository directory, what is the command prompt telling me?

The branch name should be obvious. If you see a ‘*’ character it means you have an unstaged changed in the repo (not committed). If you see a ‘+’ character your changes have been staged but not pushed to a remote branch. If you see a ‘%’ character it means you have created new file(s) but haven’t started tracking them yet (haven’t run ‘git add filename’). If you see a ‘>’ character it means what is checked out is ahead of the remote server. A ‘<‘ and ‘=’ character means your checked out repository is behind or equal to the remote server.