fish git prompt ignores untracked files above current directory

[marcvangend]

Hi all, thanks for your work on fish-shell. I'm using fish (version 3.0.2) on MacOS (10.14.6) in an Iterm2 (build 3.3.2) terminal. Using fish_config I have selected the "Informative Vcs" prompt.

I am not sure if this is considered a bug, but at least I'm wondering why the fish git prompt does not always show that untracked files are present. To be precise: the "untrackedfiles" character (…) only appears in the prompt when untracked files are present in or below the current directory. When untracked files are present above the current directory (off course still within the same git repo) the git prompt seems to ignore them.

This behavior seems to be caused by the __fish_git_prompt_informative_status command. By contrast, the __fish_git_prompt_untracked command always returns the expected value.

To illustrate what I mean, I made this screenshot reproducing the issue:

As you can see, file.txt is untracked, but once you descend into the "sub" directory, the prompt shows the "cleanstate" check mark even though __fish_git_prompt_untracked recognizes the presence of an untracked file.

I also tested this without third-party customizations (sh -c 'env HOME=$(mktemp -d) fish'), with the "Informative Vcs" prompt as only customization. The same behavior occurred.

[zanchey]

This behaviour was copied from the Informative git prompt for bash when it was first imported into the tree - you can still see the command in https://github.com/magicmonty/bash-git-prompt/blob/21063bcd924bd8efb65eb36b2fe12ffd6ed1b6a5/gitstatus_pre-1.7.10.sh#L53

It would be possible to update it to use git status --porcelain or similar. I quite like the current behaviour, but I'm certainly not attached to it.

[marcvangend]

Thanks @zanchey. As far as I can see, that line of code dates back to October 2015, which makes it extra interesting to see (magicmonty/bash-git-prompt#27) that this behavior had already been reported as bug and fixed in 2013!

But anyway, IMHO the question we really should be answering is: Is this the behavior we want? Does it make sense? Personally, I think the behavior is confusing because AFAIK all of the other git status icons refer to the entire repo, not the current directory.

By the way, I don't think we would need to parse the output of git status --porcelain to change the behavior. As shown, __fish_git_prompt_untracked already returns the expected information, and does so by calling git ls-files --others --exclude-standard --directory --no-empty-directory --error-unmatch -- :/.

[zanchey]

Sure, I think we'd take a patch to fix it

[glass-ships]

@marcvangend At least laterally related; is that a packaged or self-written fish prompt? I'm quite curious about getting the git status symbols included but I'm having trouble. I came across this post which gives an example prompt, and references this bit of code that simply mentions (__fish_git_prompt) is deprecated, but I haven't found much information beyond that. Would be interested in seeing yours as an example if you're open

[faho]

@glass-ships That's our fish_git_prompt function (which used to be called __fish_git_prompt) when the informative mode is enabled.

Set $__fish_git_prompt_show_informative_status to 1 with a prompt that uses fish_git_prompt.

[glass-ships]

I see, thank you for the clarification @faho !!