gitstatus

gitstatus enables much faster vcs/git prompt in Powerlevel10k ZSH theme. It works on Linux and WSL. See benchmarks.

Installation

1. Install Powerlevel10k ZSH theme.

2. If you use WSL (even occasionally), it's a good idea to define this option in your .zshrc:

# When running on WSL, do not scan dirty files in git repos with over 4k files.
[[ $(</proc/version) =~ Microsoft ]] && GITSTATUS_DIRTY_MAX_INDEX_SIZE=4096

With this option gitstatus won't be looking for dirty (unstaged and untracked) files in git repos with over 4k files. Scanning such repos is incredibly slow on WSL! The prompt will indicate with color that there might be dirty files. With default color settings it means the prompt will never be green.

The option must be set before sourcing gitstatus.

3. Clone gitstatus repo.

# Assuming oh-my-zsh at the standard location. Adjust to your circumstances.
git clone https://github.com/romkatv/gitstatus.git ~/.oh-my-zsh/custom/plugins/gitstatus

4. Either manually source gitstatus.plugin.zsh from your .zshrc or enable gitstatus plugin in oh-my-zsh.

How it works

When using common tools such as vcs_info to embed git status in shell prompt, latency is high for three main reasons:

1. About a dozen processes are created to generate each prompt. Creating processes and pipes to communicate with them is expensive.
2. There is a lot of redundancy between different git commands that are invoked. For example, every command has to scan parent directories in search of .git. Many commands have to resolve HEAD. Several have to read index.
3. There is redundancy between consecutive prompts, too. Even if you stay within the same repo, each prompt will read git index form disk before it can be rendered.

Some prompt generators attempt to work around this problem by rendering prompt asynchronously. This has undesirable effects. When you cd to another repo, or make changes to an existing repo such as creating a new untracked file, the prompt will either display incorrect repo state and fix later while you are typing, or not display the prompt at all and add it a second later.

gitstatus solves this problem by running a daemon next to each interactive shell. Whenever prompt needs to refresh, it sends the current directory to the daemon and receives git info back, all with a single roundtrip. The daemon is written in C++ and is using libgit2 under the hood for heavy lifting. it keeps indices of all repos in memory for faster access. It never serves stale data -- every prompt receives accurate representation of the current state of the repo. Since fetching git info this way very fast, there is no need for asynchronous prompts.

Requirements

• To compile: C++17 compiler, GNU make, libgit2.
• To run: Linux, GNU libc.

Compiling

There is a prebuilt gitstatusd ELF binary for x64 that should work on Linux and WSL. When you source gitstatus.plugin.zsh, it'll pick up gitstatusd automatically if it's in the same directory.

If the precompiled binary doesn't work for you, you'll need to get your hands dirty. First, download, compile and install libgit2. For best results, compile it statically with all optional features disabled and all required features bundled.

git clone https://github.com/libgit2/libgit2.git
cd libgit2
mkdir build
cd build
cmake                        \
  -DUSE_SSH=OFF              \
  -DUSE_HTTPS=OFF            \
  -DTHREADSAFE=OFF           \
  -DBUILD_SHARED_LIBS=OFF    \
  -DUSE_EXT_HTTP_PARSER=OFF  \
  -DUSE_BUNDLED_ZLIB=ON      \
  -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release \
  ..
make VERBOSE=1 -j 20
sudo make install

Then build gitstatus itself.

git clone https://github.com/romkatv/gitstatus.git
cd gitstatus
make -j 20

More Docs

Run gitstatusd --help for help or read the same thing in options.cc.

There are also docs in gitstatus.plugin.zsh.

License

GNU General Public License v3.0. See LICENSE.