There are a lot of GUI tools to interact with git these days but, a lot of us, we are still using the terminal for that. One thing I have found very useful is, once you are in a folder with a git repository, to be able to see the branch in use on the terminal prompt. We can achieve this with a few steps.

Step 1

Let’s check the actual definition of our prompt. Mine looks something like:

echo $PS1
\[\e]0;\u@\h: \w\a\]\[\033[01;32m\]\u@\h\[\033[00m\]:\[\033[01;34m\]\w\[\033[00m\]$

Step 2

Open with our favourite the file ‘~/.bashrc. In my case, ‘Vim’.

Step 3

Let’s create a small function to figure out the branch we are once we are on a folder with a git repository.

git_branch() {
  git branch 2> /dev/null | sed -e '/^[^*]/d' -e 's/* \(.*\)/(\1)/'
}

Step 4

Let’s redefine the variable ‘PS1’ to include the function we have just defined. In addition, let’s add some colour to the branch name to be able to see it easily. Taking my initial values and adding the function call the result should be something like:

export PS1="\[\e]0;\u@\h: \w\a\]${debian_chroot:+($debian_chroot)}\[\033[01;32m\]\u@\h\[\033[00m\]:\[\033[01;34m\]\w\[\033[00m\] \[\033[00;32m\]\$(git_branch)\[\033[00m\]\$ "

And, it should look like: