Possible to use the git segment with a detached worktree?

[windowsrefund]

By detached, I mean the associated bare repo resides elsewhere. A common use-case for this pattern comes up when managing dotfiles as outlined here.

TL;DR This workflow leans into creating a wrapper function around (for example) git --git-dir="$DOTFILES" --work-tree="$HOME" "$@"

I've been reading the docs on the git segment and while I see the support for worktrees, I don't see any evidence things are designed to work when the bare repo resides elsewhere on the filesystem. Hopefully I'm just overlooking something obvious?

Thanks in advance.

[windowsrefund]

I've been reading more about the template capabilities. While I can see the potential of evaluating the conditional based on a data structure provided via var, I don't think there will be a way to act when the conditional is met. In other words, there would be no way to pass a different path to something like {{ .HEAD }} or even sneakily change the PWD behind the scenes.

Thinking this won't be possible but will leave this open for a few days on the off-chance someone has an idea.

[JanDeDobbeleer]

@windowsrefund this is not supported. There's always the need for a .git folder or file, as oh-my-posh is folder based for context. This use-case is very exotic git usage (I haven't come across this use case in my 13 years of doing this), and I don't see how it can be supported besides exposing those API's (which makes everything else super challenging).

My proposal, make use of the function hook we provide and add the context you need in an environment variable.

[windowsrefund]

I appreciate the guidance and will dig into your suggestion.

[windowsrefund]

Have been giving this some additional thought and seeing no real potential for a win with the set_poshcontext approach, I wanted to raise a possibility and related question. Seems to me, the easiest way to profit would be to set a suitable alias for git based on $PWD. Managing the state of the alias would be done outside the scope of oh-my-posh. The hope here would be that oh-my-posh would just call the git command as needed by appending args as needed.

In order to start verifying this theory, I just went ahead and set the alias globally.

alias git="git --git-dir=$DOTFILES --work-tree=$HOME"

So far, my theory seems entirely reasonable. However, my debug messages show me the args passed by the segment aren't being appended. Instead, they're clobbering and this confuses me.

[TRACE] 10:33:20.995 git.go:getGitCommandOutput(git -C /home/windowsrefund --no-optional-locks -c core.quotepath=false -c color.status=false rev-parse --is-bare-repository) - 945.068µs

Aside from my curiosity related to how the args are being passed to the git binary, the above also raises another question related to the use of -C. Why is that being included at all? Reading the man page, I see the use of -C has (what would be) a negative effect on args like --git-dir and --work-tree. Maybe -C is being used too greedily as my imagination could entertain the idea it makes sense when more exotic elements such as worktrees and/or submodules are found. I'm not sure...

Thanks in advance

[JanDeDobbeleer]

Your assumption is correct, it's indeed necessary when using worktrees and submodules. The fact that your alias doesn't work is because that solely exists in the context of your shell and is not an actual executable that lives on your PATH. Go can't call that.

[windowsrefund]

Fair enough. Just to be clear, you don't see potential to add support for overriding args passed to the git binary? If that were possible, we'd be able to set them based on template evaluations.

In addition to the above idea, I also tried using the set_poshcontext hook to export GIT_DIR and GIT_WORK_TREE environment variables. That worked well as both environment variables were intact after an exec zsh but again, the underlying git command doesn't seem to see them.

[JanDeDobbeleer]

It should see it, I can add an optional args property that's evaluated to solve this challenge. Let's see if/how that could work.

[windowsrefund]

Interesting. I'll be happy to help test. Thanks again for the feedback.