Subject: Re: Why git branch --show-current ignores -v?

From: Sergey Organov <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 26 Dec 2025 18:43:22 +0300

Junio C Hamano <[email-masked]> writes:

> Sergey Organov <[email-masked]> writes:
>
>> It looks useful and natural for "git branch --show-current -v[v]" to
>> verbosely describe current branch, similar to what --list does. Is there
>> sound reason why -v is not supported by --show-current?
>

[...]

> I do not think anybody terribly objects if somebody teaches "-v" to
> make "git branch --show-current" more verbose, and other "--list"
> operations in general, but I suspect that the exact contents in the
> verbose output may have to be different from that of "--list".  For
> one thing, as "--show-current" limits its output to the current
> branch, the two-place indent "git branch --list" gives its output is
> not there, and "-v" would probably not want to add it.

Yep, I didn't mean to suggest exactly the same format and contents,
though just reproducing the --list won't hurt either.

The actual use-case was to quickly figure the upstream branch and
relative status of the current one, and

    git br --show-current -vv

just looked more natural for the job at hand than something like

    git br -lvv master

that besides is not exactly the same, and then the following one is
kinda overkill for manual use)))

    git br -lvv `git br --show-current`

That suddenly gets me to why Git has no synonym for the current branch
in the first place? No @HEAD or @@?

   git br -lvv @@

is pretty-looking perl'y that unfortunately doesn't work.

Thanks,
Sergey Organov