Force "git status" to output color on the terminal (inside a script)

EDIT:

I would like to make a strong recommendation that parsing colors is a generally ill-conceived idea.

Part of why i wanted it was so I can both parse it and pass it along in my own script output. This is... okay, but it would probably be saner to use porcelain or some such and re-build the colored parts myself!

Original answer follows.

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I keep finding answers really quickly after asking questions. Something to do with thinking about a problem long enough to write it out that you formulate better approaches for solving it. Anyway, the solution to this is just

git config color.status always

I imagine that a general purpose solution involves expect or something pty related to force any programs that require it into thinking they are on a terminal.

To avoid changing your git config, you can enable colour just for the current command by passing a config variable with -c.

For the status command, the variable is color.status:

    git -c color.status=always status | less -REX

For diff, show, log and grep commands, the variable is color.ui:

    git -c color.ui=always diff | less -REX

Note that -c must come before the status or diff argument, and not after.

Alternatively, for diff, show, log and grep commands, you can use --color=always after the command:

    git diff --color=always | less -REX

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Note: As Steven said, if you are trying to extract meaningful data, then instead of parsing colours to extract meaning, you can use --porcelain to get more parser-friendly output.

    git status --porcelain | awk ...

Then if you wanted, you could reintroduce colours later.

To get the user's configured colours, you can use git config --get-colour:

    reset_color="$(tput sgr0)"
    remote_branch_color="$(git config --get-color color.branch.remote white)"

    echo "Pushing to ${remote_branch_color}${branch_name}${reset_color}"

Some more examples here.