Show current git branch in tmux status bar
October 12, 2020 ‐ 1 min read
For a while I had my current git branch name showing in my ZSH prompt. Which you can pretty easily do if you use something like oh-my-zsh for example. But it became a bit too cluttering for me after some time. Both the width of the prompt and seeing the branch for each command bother me a bit.
Since I am practically always in a tmux session anyway I wanted to see if I could show the current git branch in the tmux status bar. The following was inspired by an answer on StackExchange.
By adding the following lines to your ~/.tmux.conf file you get the current git branch in the right corner of my tmux status bar.
# ~/.tmux.conf
set -g status-right "#(cd #{pane_current_path}; git rev-parse --abbrev-ref HEAD)"
set -g status-right-length 200
For one project we use very long branch names, generated by bitbucket based on a JIRA issue title... ugg. So I had to increase the length of status-right for the branch name not to be cut off somewhere in the middle. The number 200 is taken somewhat out of the air.