gitstatus is a fast alternative to git status. Its primary use case is to enable fast git prompt in interactive shells.

gitstatus is bundled with several ZSH themes including Powerlevel10k.

1. What it does
2. How it works
3. Benchmarks
4. Requirements
5. Compiling
6. User documentation
7. License

gitstatus reads requests from stdin and prints responses to stdout. Request contain an ID and a directory. Response contains the same ID and machine-readable git status for the directory. gitstatus keeps some state in memory for the directories it has seen in order to serve future requests faster.

ZSH bindings start gitstatus in the background and communicate with it via pipes. Powerlevel10k uses these bindings to put git status into PROMPT.

gitstatus is built on top of patched libgit2 with a few large performance optimizations, a number of small ones, and a score of bug fixes. The biggest performance wins come from the following sources:

• Using all available cores to scan index and work directory in parallel.
• Reducing the number of stat calls to the absolute minimum.
• Avoiding unnecessary string comparisons, especially with long shared prefixes.
• Parsing and evaluating .gitignore rules lazily.

Changes to libgit2 are extensive but the testing they underwent isn't. It is not recommended to use the patched libgit2 or gitstatus in production.

The following benchmark results were obtained on Intel i9-7900X running Ubuntu 18.04 in a clean chromium repository synced to 9bcb0ae. The repository was checked out to an ext4 filesysem on M.2 SSD.

Three functionally equivalent tools for obtaining git status were benchmarked:

• gitstatus itself
• git status with untracked cache enabled
• lg2 status -- a subset of git status functionality implemented on libgit2 as a demo/example; for the purposes of this benchmark the subset is sufficient to generate the same data as the other tools

Every tool was benchmark in cold and hot conditions. For git status the first run in a repository was considered cold, with the following runs considered hot. lg2 status was patched to compute status twice in a single invocation without freeing the repository in between; the second run was considered hot. Similarly with gitstatus -- the same request was sent to it twice, the second being hot.

In this benchmark gitstatus is 9 times faster than git status and 18 times faster than lg2 status when status for the same repository is requested for the second time. This is the primary use case for interactive shells.

• To compile: C++14 compiler, GNU make, cmake.
• To run: GNU libc on Linux, FreeBSD and WSL; nothing on Mac OS.

There are prebuilt gitstatusd binaries in bin. When using ZSH bindings privided by gitstatus.plugin.zsh, the right binary for your architecture is picked up automatically.

If precompiled binaries don't work for you, you'll need to get your hands dirty.

zsh -c "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/romkatv/gitstatus/master/build.zsh)"

If everything goes well, the path to your newly built binary will be printed at the end.

If something breaks due to a missing dependency (e.g., cmake not found), install the dependency, remove /tmp/gitstatus and retry.

To build from locally modified sources, read build.zsh and improvise.

Run gitstatusd --help for help or read the same thing in options.cc.

ZSH bindings are documented in gitstatus.plugin.zsh.

GNU General Public License v3.0. See LICENSE. Contributions are covered by the same license.