Sometimes, working with git, you may forget which branch you are currently in. In this case vcprompt can help. It allows to see right in the command line prompt various information about your current repository, for example, a current branch name, or a fact of having changed or untracked files.

For example, my PS1 variable is:

\W `vcprompt -f "%m%u %s:%b"`\$

making the prompt in bash to be like this:

_engine +? git:master$

It says that the current directory is _engine and there is a git repository here, the current branch is master, and there are changed (+) and also untracked files (?). If there is no repo in the current repository, the prompt will be normal.

vcprompt supports not only git, but bzr, cvs, darcs, fossil, hg, svn.

It requires Python, and is also hardly usable on Windows.