Adding the current Git branch to your terminal prompt
Tips and tricks / Jan. 29, 2015
Martin Fitzpatrick has a great tip that helps me keep my sanity when working with Git branches. Googling will give you lots of ways of accomplishing this, but this one is simple, straight-forward, and works well for me. I won’t repeat his post, but basically you add a short bit of code to the .bash_profile
file that lives in your home folder. Note that if this is your first time altering Bash, .bash_profile
may not exist, so you’ll have to create it using Sublime Text or whatever text editor you like.
I like having color in Terminal, but I find a colored prompt distracts from the other colored content, which is usually for colored for more important or informational reasons. This post on OSXDaily has a good rundown of adding color to Terminal.
Here’s my .bash_profile which puts the Git branch in light gray.
# Enable colors export CLICOLOR=1 export LSCOLORS=ExFxBxDxCxegedabagacad # Get current Git branch parse_git_branch() { git branch 2> /dev/null | sed -e '/^[^*]/d' -e 's/* \(.*\)/ (\1)/' } # Prompt appearance export PS1="\h:\W\[\033[37m\]\$(parse_git_branch)\[\033[00m\]$ "