Slow prompt in large git repos? speed up with lilgit

abathur · January 18, 2021, 1:26am

Hi all,

If you have git-status info in your prompt, you likely find large repos annoying. @colemickens kindly nerd-sniped me on Christmas Eve by pointing out gitstatusd (gitAndTools.gitstatus).

I’m a git-status minimalist, so I tried to out-perform gitstatus when I noticed how much detail it collects. This went far better than I imagined, and I’m excited to share lilgit now that its dependencies are in *-unstable channels.

Interested?

try it out yourself in nix-shell
peek at the ~rough performance comparison
see the instructions for adding it to your profile.

If you find it promising, I could use a little help improving the daemonization/IPC implementation. The MVP uses bash coproc for simplicity, but it has some downsides:

Currently limited to bash (but this isn’t intrinsic!)
It launches one lilgitd per terminal/shell for now. Rewriting the daemon in Rust improved memory use (~13 → 2.3MB /instance), but a multi-client daemon would further improve memory use.
Your terminal may nag about the active lilgitd process on close. In Terminal.app I add lilgitd to a list of running executables to ignore on close.

abathur · January 23, 2021, 9:17pm

I’ve pushed an update today rewriting the Python ~daemon component in Rust. This:

brings a nice improvement to startup time
drops per-instance memory use from ~13MB → 2.3MB
further improves the speed when it can respond without shelling out to git

I’m hoping the increased performance means there are some places where it currently shells out that it can handle without doing so, but I haven’t played around with it yet.

abathur · July 1, 2023, 5:30am

Forgot to mention that I also added a flake for this back in January.

shimun · July 10, 2023, 4:11pm

Could you add a example for somebody who hasn’t messed with $PS1 before?

abathur · July 10, 2023, 4:52pm

It might help to know what you’re hoping to see demonstrated?

The most-basic example is in the readme already:

github.com

abathur/lilgit/blob/26b73bda72558eacade157397224c964a8f56280/README.md?plain=1#L85


      
          
          
If you use [resholve](https://github.com/abathur/resholve) for your rc/profile script, you can just drop lilgit in the inputs as below:
          
          
```nix
          pkgs.resholve.writeScript "trivial-test" {
            # interpreter can be "none" after nixos/nixpkgs#210761
            interpreter = "${pkgs.bash}/bin/bash";
            inputs = [ lilgit ];
          } ''
          source lilgit.bash
          export PS1="$__lilgit"
          trap __go_off_now_lilgit EXIT
          ''
          ```
          
          
You can find a complete real-world example of how I do this in https://github.com/abathur/bashrc.nix
          
          
If you don't use `resholve`, you'll want to do one of the following:
          1. add `lilgit` to your system/user packages, and let your profile find lilgit via `PATH` lookup
          2. explicitly write/substitute the correct path to lilgit into your profile

People and platforms/distros often customize PS1, so you’d generally just include that wherever your PS1 is already set.

You can also see the PS1 used for the demo (GitHub - abathur/lilgit: a smol (quick) git status prompt plugin) in:

github.com

abathur/lilgit/blob/26b73bda72558eacade157397224c964a8f56280/prompt_demo.sh#L11


      
          echo -e "\nHey, thanks for trying \033[1;34mlilgit\033[0m. Just '\033[1;33mexit\033[0m' when you're done.\n"
          
          
source "$LILGITBASH"
          
          
# override __lilgit to time each invocation
          __lilgit='$(time __go_on_now_lilgit)'
          
          
# override 'time' format to just use wall time
          TIMEFORMAT="__go_on_now_lilgit  took: %lR"
          
          
PS1="__go_on_now_lilgit wrote: '$__lilgit'\n\[\033[1;33m\]\w\[\033[0m\] $ "

The readme also links out to my bashrc flake which has a more complex example:

github.com

abathur/bashrc.nix/blob/6b4c2dd9eb46ba28c9b76a6c089ce224c6d8d725/bashrc#L126-L137


      
          function __build_prompt()
          {
            # shellcheck disable=SC2155
            IFS= local duration="$(__end)"
            if [[ -n "$duration" ]]; then
              __line1="\[\033[1m\]$duration\[\033[0m\]\n\n"
              export PS1="$__line1$__line2$__line3\[\033[0m\]"
            else
              __line1=''
              export PS1="$__line2$__line3\[\033[0m\]"
            fi
          }

Are you hoping for something none of these cover?