Git Status Idea

[philipbordallo]

I've been using starship for a while now and it's been great. But one thing I've noticed is the git status symbols are a bit overwhelming. There is a lot of them, and their meaning and reason for showing up isn't always clear.

While I was looking to customize them/clean things up I ran into #1371 and it made me realize is there a benefit to having that level of detail? Do I care whether something was modified, deleted, or renamed as well as all the other information? Or is it more important to know if something has changed, is untracked, has a conflict, is staged, has been stashed or is in-sync with the remote?

Idea

• Add a changed state to handle all modifications and deletions in the working directory.
• Update staged state to included modifications, deletions and renames that have been staged.
• Remove deleted and renamed states.

This would mean that the states for git status would be:

state	description
changed	A file has been modified or deleted in the working directory.
untracked	A new file that is not been tracked has been added.
conflicted	There is a conflict in the current branch.
staged	A file that has been modified, deleted, or renamed has been staged.
stashed	A stash exists for the local repository.
ahead	This branch is ahead of the branch being tracked.
behind	This branch is behind of the branch being tracked.
diverged	This branch has diverged from the branch being tracked.

Examples

Given these files:

.
├── one.txt
└── two.txt

And these sequential actions taken:

1. one.txt has been deleted, the state would be changed.
2. two.txt has been renamed to three.txt, the state would be changed and untracked.
3. The deleted one.txt has been staged, the state would be changed, staged, and untracked
4. All the other changes have been staged, the state would be staged

This way at a quick glance you can see what state git is in and if more information needs to be gleaned (did these changes include a deletion or was it a rename?) running git status can give you more details.

[matchai]

Thanks for the suggestion Philip! 😄

I can definitely see how the git status module can get noisy and overwhelming. There's certainly room to simplify the git status module to show less details, and for what it's worth, Starship can be considerably faster if we could stop checking for git status as soon as a single file was in one of these states. 🚀