Inspired by vcprompt and its Python port, VCSInfo is a tool that allows you to extract information from a local version control repository directory and generate a string that you can embed in your terminal prompt. For example, in Bash, you could do something like this:
$ export PS1="\u@\h:\w \$(vcsinfo)\$ "
And end up with a prompt that looks like:
yourname@yourhost:~ $ cd mycoolproject
yourname@yourhost:~/mycoolproject git[master]$ touch somefile.txt
yourname@yourhost:~/mycoolproject git[master+]$ cd ..
yourname@yourhost:~ $
It's rather handy for knowing the state of the repository you're working in without the need to always manually invoke one or more commands depending on the VCS you're using.
Why recreate something that already exists? A few reasons: niether version of vcprompt has been updated in several years, the Python version could be slow, the C version was missing some VCS systems, and I wanted an excuse to learn Go, which is what this implementation was written in.
VCSInfo is a simple program -- it's one executable that you should put in your path somewhere. There are several ways to get your hands on it:
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Download from our GitHub Releases. Every release will be available here with pre-built binaries for all the platforms we support. We'll also provide RPMs and DEBs.
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Homebrew. We provide a custom tap that allows Homebrew users to easily install vcsinfo.
$ brew tap jayclassless/vcsinfo $ brew install vcsinfo -
Compile from source. If you're comfortable build Go projects, you're welcome to retrieve the source and build it yourself.
Just executing vcsinfo will examine the current directory and output a
short string that summarizes the state of the current repository, if the
current directory is in one. If you'd like to examine a different directory
than your current, use the --path option.
If you'd like to have VCSInfo output a string formatted differently than the
default, you can use the --format option to specify a format string. In
this string, you can use a number of % codes to embed the information
VCSInfo finds. These codes are:
| Code | Description | VCS Returned For |
|---|---|---|
| %n | VCS name | All |
| %h | Hash | bzr, darcs, fossil, git, hg |
| %s | Short Hash | git, hg |
| %r | Revision ID | bzr, hg, svn |
| %v | Short Hash, Revision ID, or Hash (whichever one that is found first is used) | All |
| %b | Branch | bzr, darcs, fossil, git, hg, svn |
| %u | Untracked files indicator | All |
| %a | Staged files indicator | git |
| %m | Modified files indicator | All |
| %t | Stashed changes indicator | bzr, git, hg |
| %P | Repository root directory | All |
| %p | Relative path to Repository root directory (relative to the analyzed path) | All |
| %e | Base name of the repository root directory | All |
| %% | Literal "%" | All |
You can also use the --json or --xml options to output JSON- or
XML-encoded structures that contain all the information VCSInfo found.
For details on all available options, run vcsinfo --help. You can also use
--help-format for information about output formatting, and --help-envar
for information about environment variables that influence VCSInfo.