Question

When using a VCS, (I use Mercurial and Git in Linux, Bash prompt), is there any way to have the prompt show the current head or tag in the directory?

More than once I have shot myself in the foot by working in one head when thinking I was in another, for example, pushing v0.3 to testing when they needed v.02, or patching bugs in dev then they needed to be patched in prod, or vice versa.

Answer 1

Git provides a bash function that shows the current branch or hash if headless. Look for __git_ps1 in the bash_completion file.

My ~/.bashrc contains these lines:

Green='\[\e[0;32m\]'
BIGreen='\[\e[1;92m\]'
Color_Off='\[\e[0m\]'
export PS1=$Green'\w $(__git_ps1 "(%s)")'$BIGreen'$ '$Color_Off

which will create a prompt like this:

~/repos/myproject (master)$