git for-each-ref with a coloured format string

Question

I\'m using git for-each-ref as a git alias to display a branch name and the subject of the last commit on that branch. That said, it\'s hard to tell where the branc

Answer 1

I don't see anything in the for-each-ref man page that suggests it supports backslash-escape sequences like \033. If you replace \033 (and \e) with a literal escape character, it seems to work just fine.

Cupcake says that for-each-ref also supports %xx hex escape sequences, which would look like:

[alias]
    logbranch = "for-each-ref --sort=-committerdate refs/heads/ --format='[%1B[0;31m]%(refname:short)[%1B[m]   %(subject)' "

This also works fine on my system.

Answer 2

Git 1.9/2.0 (Q1 2014) will introduce color formatting for git for-each-ref.
See commit fddb74c from Ramkumar Ramachandra (artagnon):

for-each-ref: introduce %(color:...) for color

Enhance 'git for-each-ref' with color formatting options.
You can now use the following format in for-each-ref:

%(color:green)%(refname:short)%(color:reset)

where color names are described in color.branch.*.

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With Git 2.15 (Q4 2017), you will be able to turn those colors on or off.

See commit 0c88bf5 (03 Oct 2017) by Jeff King (peff).
^{(Merged 04 Oct 2017)}

provide --color option for all ref-filter users

When ref-filter learned about want_color() in 11b087a (ref-filter: consult want_color() before emitting colors, 2017-07-13), it became useful to be able to turn colors off and on for specific commands. For git-branch, you can do so with --color/--no-color.

But for git-for-each-ref and git-tag, the other users of ref-filter, you have no option except to tweak the "color.ui" config setting. Let's give both of these commands the usual color command-line options.

This is a bit more obvious as a method for overriding the config. And it also prepares us for the behavior of "always" changing (so that we are still left with a way of forcing color when our output goes to a non-terminal).