TIL: How to speed up git status in your Bash prompt

Photo by Roman Synkevych on Unsplash

Bash prompt

A while ago I wrote about how to customize your terminal prompt with Bash only:

How to customize your terminal prompt with Bash only

In order to get your git status displayed in the prompt, I turned to the official git-prompt.sh shell script, which you can find here:

git/contrib/completion/git-prompt.sh at master · git/git

Speeding things up

However, after a while, and especially on large repos, I started noticing that this slowed down my terminal considerably. Granted that git status is an expensive command as it is, after having a look at git-prompt.sh — which is about 500 lines of code — I found that there was still some room to speed things up.

Of course, the exact definition of what git status information is relevant in a terminal prompt, will differ from user to user. For me, though, I found that the…