Modeling With Data

git status interactive

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One of the first things that struck me as nice about Git was the status command, which produces something just shy of a script for revising the status of all the files. It even gives you tips about how to do common tasks.

I got even more excited when I saw git rebase --interactive, which generates a semi-script, opens it for you to edit, and then runs the thing automatically. That was smooth.

So I expected there'd be a similar procedure like git status --interactive, which, if it existed, would work like this:

• You type git istatus.
• Your favorite editor opens. There, you see the output from git status, plus instructions for some basic commands: put an a at the head of a line to add a file, an i to ignore it from now on, an ea to edit then add (which you'll do if you're merging), an r to remove the file from the repository, and so on.
• You exit, and your instructions are run.

Git doesn't do that. So I wrote a demo script to make that happen, git-status-interactive.

Click that link to save the script to your hard drive, and make it executable via the usual chmod 755 git-status-interactive. You probably want to alias the script using Git's aliasing system. For example, to allow the git istatus command I'd shown above, try this command from your bash prompt, in a single git repository:

git config --add alias.istatus \!/your/path/to/git-status-interactive

Or if you have the permissions to make global changes to the git config:

git config --global --add alias.istatus \!/your/path/to/git-status-interactive

Some further notes

The script is a demo—dead simple, with no serious error checking. To some extent it's a feature request: Dear Git team, please implement something like this in Git, but competently. Also, dear readers, please drop me an email if you've improved this thing for the better.

By the way, Git does have git add -i, which behaves very differently from the edit-a-generated-file mechanism from git rebase --interactive. git add -i doesn't let me tick off files to ignore, and doesn't help immensely during merging; though it will give you more control when adding, like committing changes to sections of a file.

Apart from git status and the shell, I use exactly one program to make this happen: Sed. The prep step runs Sed to take in the output of git status and then remove non-comment lines and insert instructions; the post-editor step run Sed to replace the one-character markers with the full commands. That's all.

Because the modified file just runs as a shell script, you can add other commands as you prefer. For example, replacing the # at the head of the line with an rm turns it into a standard remove command, or you can mv a file that git complains is in the wrong place (probably due to merging issues), et cetera.

In case you missed the link in the text above, download git-status-interactive from Github.

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