Re: Git Status Short Output Color Inconsistency with -z Flag

From: Jeff King <peff@peff.net>
Date: Oct 7, 2025, 08:29 UTC
Message-ID: <20251007082920.GA3349249@coredump.intra.peff.net>
In-Reply-To: <XCDlwEkTlgoZIyIf_8BfOGl1C3C63Ioxeib4BRNJ9Jm_CtYWKT3qu-pDaeXVtS1Ifq6E4pT9G0yDbIS_nSwN-uiBuBNAlMyrOv0R1RyM7oc=@protonmail.com>

On Sun, Oct 05, 2025 at 12:48:43AM +0000, Langbart wrote:

Show 13 quoted lines

> What did you do before the bug happened? (Steps to reproduce your issue)
> 
> 1. Create an untracked file and modify an existing tracked file
> 2. Run: git status --short -z
> 
> What did you expect to happen? (Expected behavior)
> 
> All status markers have colors disabled
> 
> What happened instead? (Actual behavior)
> 
> - Modified marker (`M`) appears colored
> - Untracked marker (`??`) appears *uncolored*

There is a bug here, but I don't think your expectation matches the documentation. In the --short output, we do still respect color. We do not for the machine-readable --porcelain output, which is also implied by "-z" without another format.

So either of:

  git status -z --porcelain

  # this implies --porcelain=v1
  git status -z

will do what you expected. Asking for "-z --short" is a bit unusual, since "--short" is meant to be human-readable and "-z" generally is not. So I'd expect it to be used only for relaying colorized information to a human over another channel or something.

But back to the bug. As you noticed, one item is colorized and the other is not. I think the fix is probably this:

diff --git a/wt-status.c b/wt-status.c
index 8ffe6d3988..e12adb26b9 100644
--- a/wt-status.c
+++ b/wt-status.c
@@ -2042,13 +2042,13 @@ static void wt_shortstatus_status(struct string_list_item *it,
 static void wt_shortstatus_other(struct string_list_item *it,
 				 struct wt_status *s, const char *sign)
 {
+	color_fprintf(s->fp, color(WT_STATUS_UNTRACKED, s), "%s", sign);
 	if (s->null_termination) {
-		fprintf(s->fp, "%s %s%c", sign, it->string, 0);
+		fprintf(s->fp, " %s%c", it->string, 0);
 	} else {
 		struct strbuf onebuf = STRBUF_INIT;
 		const char *one;
 		one = quote_path(it->string, s->prefix, &onebuf, QUOTE_PATH_QUOTE_SP);
-		color_fprintf(s->fp, color(WT_STATUS_UNTRACKED, s), "%s", sign);
 		fprintf(s->fp, " %s\n", one);
 		strbuf_release(&onebuf);
 	}

which matches how other output functions like wt_shortstatus_unmerged()
behave (handling color before hitting the null_termination conditional).

-Peff