Git status in shell prompt with Nix Home Manager

By Jeff Kreeftmeijer on 2023-03-19 (originally published on 2023-03-13)

Git comes with a script named git-prompt.sh that exposes information about the current directory’s repository to use in your shell’s prompt. The script is in the contrib directory, but I used to extract it to not have to download the git source to set my prompt.

Using Nix, the prompt is available in the ~/.nix-profile directory, meaning setting up the prompt doesn’t require remembering to download an extra file. Instead, it’s three lines in programs.zsh.initExtra to source the script and set the prompt¹:

programs.zsh.initExtra =
''
source ~/.nix-profile/share/git/contrib/completion/git-prompt.sh
setopt PROMPT_SUBST
export PS1='%~ $(__git_ps1 "(%s) ")%# '
'';

This produces prompts like ~/repository (main) % inside a git repository, and ~/not/a/repository % elsewhere.

This example is for zsh, omit the setopt and alter the PS1 for bash:

programs.bash.initExtra =
''
source ~/.nix-profile/share/git/contrib/completion/git-prompt.sh
export PS1='\w $(__git_ps1 "(%s) ")$ '
'';

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