Let Your Prompt Tell You When To Pull

published on August 20th, 2013

During the last weeks, I have on numerous occasions simply forgotten to check repositories for updates. I have then often re-implemented functionality (after swearing that whoever was responsible for it hadn't done it yet) that was in fact already implemented in the remote repository.

This is of course quite terrible, mostly because it makes me feel like an absolute idiot (rightly so?) and because it makes me waste time (admittedly the functionality had been quite small, otherwise I probably would have pulled, but still). So I set out to modify my zsh prompt so that it will inform me when the remote repository is ahead of my local repository. The solution turned out to be quite simple, I just had to add

ZSH_THEME_GIT_PROMPT_BEHIND_REMOTE="%{$fg_bold[red]%}↓↓↓%{$reset_color%}"
ZSH_THEME_GIT_PROMPT_AHEAD_REMOTE="%{$fg_bold[red]%}↑↑↑%{$reset_color%}"
ZSH_THEME_GIT_PROMPT_DIVERGED_REMOTE="%{$fg_bold[red]%}↕↕↕%{$reset_color%}"

to my current zsh scheme.

Now, whenever a remote repository that I am tracking has new functionality my prompt informs me by showing me something along these lines: