# Re: Fwd: git status options feature suggestion 2 messages from 2008-10-12 to 2008-10-18. Participants: Leo Razoumov, Fyn Fynn. Thread: https://gitlist.dev/t/15866 ## Leo Razoumov, 2008-10-12 10:09 Subject: Re: Fwd: git status options feature suggestion Message-ID: URL: https://gitlist.dev/e/ee2a733e0810120309o1fbfa4dxe6f2292a28bd6db3%40mail.gmail.com ``` On 10/12/08, Junio C Hamano wrote: > [..snip..] > I was going to suggest the same. "git st" for people who come from "svn st" > so that "git status" can be kept as traditional "preview of 'git commit'". > > And just make it mimic whatever folks accustomed to "svn st" would expect, > modulo we would need two status letters to signal difference between > (HEAD, index), and (index, worktree). Perhaps three if you want to show > difference between (HEAD, worktree) while at it. > > And no, I have not seen any argument good enough to change ls-files nor > diff-$lowlevel output and break people's existing scripts. > Please, at least introduce a new option (--status-letters) that makes git log --name-status git diff --name-status git ls-files -v to use consistent letters to indicate the status. For details, see recent discussion http://www.spinics.net/lists/git/msg81141.html Thanks, --Leo-- ``` ## Fyn Fynn, 2008-10-18 00:19 Subject: Re: Fwd: git status options feature suggestion Message-ID: <1a04eebf0810171719r6b604a88n781bf43f0f047aae@mail.gmail.com> URL: https://gitlist.dev/e/1a04eebf0810171719r6b604a88n781bf43f0f047aae%40mail.gmail.com In-Reply-To: ``` Just wanted to chime in about a feature existing in Bazaar's and Subversion's and "status" command: getting the status of tracked files _only_. Here's how the status -V switch works in Bazaar: ~/foo$ bzr init ~/foo$ echo "content" > bar.txt ~/foo$ bzr add bar.txt added bar.txt ~/foo$ echo "content" > baz.txt ~/foo$ bzr status added: bar.txt unknown: baz.txt ~/foo$ bzr status -V added: bar.txt As you can see, the -V switch makes `bzr status` only display the status of files that are tracked. This is very useful when you're tracking a "skeleton" of essential files in a directory tree that contains a large number of additional files and subdirectories, particularly if those are changing often and / or are large/binary so it's impractical to control/ignore them. A common case of that: tracking a subset of configuration files under one's home directory. Right now, there are two ways of getting around the lack of "status -V" (Subversion: "status -q") in git (credit for both goes to doener on #git@FreeNode, who showed them to me): git config --global alias.st 'diff --name-status HEAD' Which makes `git st` output practically the same thing as -V/-q in Bazaar/Subversion. However, the output doesn't distinguish between Staged (indexed) and Unstaged (non-indexed) changes (a distinction that the 2 other SCMs above don't support). git config --global alias.st '!echo Staged:; git diff --cached --name-status; echo Unstaged:; git diff --name-status' Which does distinguish between Staged and Unstaged, but is definitely something that can work only as an alias for frequent usage. Incidentally, a minor quibble with both solutions is that they require HEAD to exist; so you need to make at least one commit before you can use them. For most users, this wouldn't frequently be a huge loss, but if you're commonly initializing branches, you might miss it. For example, note how the above Bazaar example would fail with: fatal: ambiguous argument 'HEAD': unknown revision or path not in the working tree. - Fyn ```