git status: git status command

git status is your "where am I" in Git. Without it, work becomes guesswork. Run it before every add and commit, and after switching branches.

What it shows

Several sections, top to bottom:

Current branch and its position relative to the remote: On branch main, Your branch is ahead of 'origin/main' by 2 commits.
Changes to be committed: what is in the index and will go into the next commit (shown in green).
Changes not staged for commit: modified tracked files that are not yet in the index (shown in red).
Untracked files: new files that Git is not tracking (shown in red).

Each section suggests the next command: "use git add to stage", "use git restore to discard".

The verbose output is useful for beginners. For day-to-day work, -s (short) is faster to read:

bash

git status -s

# M  README.md     ← staged: modified

# MM src/api.ts    ← staged and then modified again

#  M src/index.ts  ← modified, not staged

# ?? newfile.txt   ← untracked

# A  added.ts      ← new, staged

# D  deleted.ts    ← deleted, staged

Two characters: left is the index state, right is the working tree state. Once you know these symbols, you read the output at a glance.

git status -sb adds a branch line at the top showing how far you are from the remote:

## main...origin/main [ahead 2, behind 1]

You have 2 local commits not in origin, and origin has 1 commit you do not have. You need to merge or rebase before pushing.

On large repositories status can be slow. If it is lagging, run git update-index --refresh or enable feature.manyFiles or core.fsmonitor in the config.
git status does not show the stash. To see what is stashed, run git stash list.
If a file is in .gitignore, status is silent about it. To find out why a file is ignored, run git check-ignore -v file.