I've started using git fairly heavily (although not necessarily very well). I have several repos: a couple are code, also my ~/.vim/ folder and I'm thinking about adding ~/bin/ . If I remember to push from a particular machine before leaving it, I'll never have to deal with merging as I'm the only user. While most likely my discomfort with merging will be overcome by practice as I understand git does it well (I use SVN at work: merging is shudder-inducing), I'm guessing keeping everything up to date is still preferable. These questions are mostly about incorporating information about the repo into the Bash prompt: I was impressed recently by the way zsh appears to handle it, with a sequence of tiny icons in the lower right corner of the terminal indicating relative status. I didn't talk to the zsh user long, so I don't know if that's built-in, a plugin, or something he did himself. I'm starting from some code I got from nitrous.io, lovely in its conciseness: parse_git_branch () { git branch --no-color 2> /dev/null | sed -e '/^[^*]/d' -e "s/* \(.*\)/\1$(parse_git_dirty)/" } parse_git_dirty () { git diff --no-ext-diff --quiet --exit-code &>/dev/null || echo "!" } Put \$(parse_git_branch) into your prompt and it tells you what branch you're on, and if there are any unstaged changes (and goes away if you're not in a repo). I'd prefer it did uncommitted rather than unstaged, haven't tried to fix that yet. But I want to update it as it doesn't deal with origin at all. So, the questions: What is the easiest and most concise way to determine if your local is behind origin master? I've found that "git remote show origin" will show this information, but I'm not sure if it's the "best" way to find out, and I'm also concerned that running that every time your prompt comes up would slow things down as it makes a remote call(?) to get an answer - when you might not even have a network connection, or worse, a very slow connection. "git status" usually says "Your branch is up-to-date with 'origin/master'" (or "ahead"), but occasionally - even though origin is configured properly - this line doesn't appear. Is there a way to convince it to always show this line? Unfortunately, "git status" doesn't seem to ever notice if you're "behind" origin, thus the need for "git remote show origin". Any fix for that? The thought was to have output for the prompt that looked like this: (everything synced): "master-" (uncommitted local changes): "master!-" (behind origin): "master^" (ahead of origin): "masterv" (ahead and behind, with local changes): "master!^v" You get the general idea. I'm aware git is capable of immense complexity (branches, detached head, multiple remotes, different remotes for push and pull, etc.) that aren't addressed here. If I tried to tackle all of that at once (especially given I don't understand most of it) my head would explode and nothing would get done. So I'm sticking with my simple use case until I have to deal with the more complex stuff. Any thoughts welcome. -- Giles http://www.gilesorr.com/ gilesorr@gmail.com