smalot / git-aware-prompt

Display current Git branch name in your terminal prompt when in a Git working directory.

Git Aware Prompt

Working with Git and its great branching/merging features is amazing. Constantly switching branches can be confusing though as you have to run git status to see which branch you're currently on.

The solution to this is to have your terminal prompt display the current branch. There's a number of articles available online about how to achieve this.

I based this project mainly on Aaron Crane's solution.

Overview

If you cd to a Git working directory, you will see the current Git branch name displayed in your terminal prompt. When you're not in a Git working directory, your prompt works like normal.

Installation

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

export GITAWAREPROMPT=~/.bash/git-aware-prompt
source $GITAWAREPROMPT/main.sh
export PS1="\u@\h \w \[$txtcyn\]\$git_branch\[$txtred\]\$git_dirty\[$txtrst\]\$ "

Optionally, if you want a nice pretty prompt when using sudo -s, also add this line:

export SUDO_PS1="\[$bakred\]\u@\h\[$txtrst\] \w\$ "

The new prompt will take effect beginning in your next session. This usually means logging out completely. To enable it in your current session, you can simply run source ~/.profile or source ~/.bash_profile (whichever you edited above) in your terminal.

Configuring

If you followed the above installation instructions, you've added the default prompt style already by defining the PS1 variable. If you don't know how to customize your prompt, I recommend you check this how-to.

Basically, to have the current Git branch shown, simply add $git_branch to your PS1 variable, and make sure the variable value is defined with double quotes. A set of color variables have also been set for you to use. For a list of available colors check colors.sh.

Updating

Assuming you followed the default installation instructions and cloned this repo to ~/.bash/git-aware-prompt:

cd ~/.bash/git-aware-prompt
git pull

Usage Tips

To view other user's tips, please check the Usage Tips wiki page. Or if you have tips of your own, feel free to add them :)

License

        DO WHAT THE FUCK YOU WANT TO PUBLIC LICENSE
                    Version 2, December 2004

 Copyright (C) 2014 Jim Myhrberg

 Everyone is permitted to copy and distribute verbatim or modified
 copies of this license document, and changing it is allowed as long
 as the name is changed.

            DO WHAT THE FUCK YOU WANT TO PUBLIC LICENSE
   TERMS AND CONDITIONS FOR COPYING, DISTRIBUTION AND MODIFICATION

  0. You just DO WHAT THE FUCK YOU WANT TO.