Git superstat 🎡

I, like a lot of developers, put all my git repositories in a single folder on my computer. (For me, that's $HOME/src.) Sometimes my work leads me to making changes in a few different repositories on my machine during a single work session, and I often want to answer the question:

What are all the projects I just made changes in, and what un-pushed changes are in each?

Superstat is a tool I wrote to answer that question quickly and concisely. It runs git status + diff across every git repository in a folder, and presents a nice visual summary, like this:

Each line has the format repo | branch | date-when-I-last-worked-on-it, followed potentially by a list of files with un-committed changes. The repo name is yellow if it has non-committed changes, and the branch name is red if it has commits that haven't been pushed upstream.

How to use superstat

Typing superstat --help tells us the following:

Superstat: git status + diff every repo in a workspace.

Usage
	superstat [rootDir] [options]

Options
	--[h]elp      Show this help message
	--[v]ersion   Print version information and exit
	--no-[c]olor  Use letters instead of colors to indicate info
	--no-[f]iles  Do not list non-committed file changes

Legend
	[repo-name] [branch] [last-worked-on-timestamp]
	            [non-committed-changes]

	- repo-name is yellow (or followed by "*") if there are non-committed
	  changes.
	- branch is red (or followed by "!") if there are unsynced changes (if
	  local is ahead of remote).
	- If no rootDir is provided, Superstat falls back to $SUPERSTAT_ROOT
	  if defined in the environment.

If you keep all your git repositories in ~/workspace/, for example, a basic usage looks like:

superstat ~/workspace

You can also set the SUPERSTAT_ROOT environment variable to your git-repository folder to save yourself some typing every time you use Superstat:

# somewhere in your ~/.profile or ~/.bashrc
export SUPERSTAT_ROOT=~/workspace

# later, in your shell
superstat

Here are what the --no-color and --no-files options look like. When using --no-color, instead of using text color to indicate each repo's status, Superstat uses little characters * and !.

The --no-files option simply hides the lists of files with non-committed changes, for a more concise view that just shows which repos may need your attention.

Install

If you have Oak installed, you can build from source (see below). Otherwise, I provide pre-built binaries for macOS (x86 and arm64) and Linux (x86) on the releases page. Just drop those into your $PATH and you should be good to go.

Instructions for Mac (other systems will differ):

1. Download the pre-built binary on the releases page
2. Rename the binary from the download name (e.g. superstat-macos-arm64) to just superstat
3. Make it executable by running chmod +x superstat (add sudo to the beginning if it doesn't let you)
4. Move the binary to somewhere in your $PATH like /usr/local/bin/
5. Restart Terminal
6. Run superstat to get the security prompt that it can't run because the developer is unverified. Check the Security & Privacy section in System Preferences where it should prompt you to allow superstat to run. If you run superstat again it should work!

Build and development

Superstat is built with my Oak programming language, and I manage build tasks with a Makefile.

• make or make build builds a version of Superstat at ./superstat
• make install installs Superstat to /usr/local/bin, in case that's where you like to keep your bins
• make fmt or make f formats all Oak source files tracked by Git