I stumbled across a really awesome project on GitHub: Powerline for Bash.

This is a great command prompt that provides something wonderful: It clearly indicates the status of your working directory for source control. Right now it supports Git, SVN, and Mercurial (admittedly I’ve only ever used it for Git). When setup, my command line looks like this when my repository is clean:

It clearly indicates when a file has been added:

And when I have commits that haven’t been pushed to my remote:

Getting it setup was straight forward. Per the instructions, download a “patched font”. This is a font that includes additional symbols used to construct the command prompt, which you can download here.

You can then clone the repository containing the script. I have a fork that includes two small changes. It uses python instead of python2, and it includes a small fix for Git 1.8.

From there, its a matter of following the instructions in the README. The README says to use .bashrc. I opted to use .bash_profile instead.

This is a great tool for those that like to stick to command line for source control, but get a few additional visual cues.