A fast, powerline-style zsh prompt that brings live, click-through GitHub status into your terminal — without ever blocking on the network.

The left side shows your local checkout; the right side is a concise "needs my attention" report for the whole repo. Every glyph is an OSC-8 hyperlink, so ⌘/Ctrl-clicking jumps straight to the relevant GitHub page.

Left prompt — your local checkout

• Abbreviated, clickable working directory (~/P/E/my-repo, each segment opens its folder via file://).
• Open-in-IDE segment: a clickable glyph opens the project in IntelliJ IDEA (when it carries a .idea/ config) and/or VS Code (in any git repo, when VS Code is installed).
• Git state: branch name, staged / modified / untracked flags, ahead/behind counts — clean vs dirty background color.
• Ref kind glyph: plain branch, open PR, draft PR, or detached HEAD.
• Build status of HEAD (passed / failed / running / waiting-for-approval), deep-linked to the specific GitHub Actions run behind that status.
• Click targets: git glyph → repo, branch name → repo at that branch, ref glyph → the PR (or the commit when detached), build glyph → the run.

Right prompt — needs my attention (each item appears only when its count > 0)

• PRs requesting my review → the review-requested search.
• My open PRs, flagged when any are approved/ready or have changes requested → the matching author searches.
• Total open PRs in the repo → the pulls list.
• Plus the last command's duration (when slow) and a HH:MM clock.

Under the hood

• gh is queried in a background job; results are cached per repo+branch, so the prompt is always instant.
• When fresh data lands, the prompt redraws itself via a zle -F fd watcher (fires only while the line editor is idle — never mid-render, so it can't corrupt the prompt the way a signal could).
• Degrades gracefully: non-GitHub repos show just the local git state; missing / unauthenticated gh simply omits the GitHub bits.

• zsh
• git
• gh, authenticated: gh auth login
• A Nerd Font for the glyphs (e.g. JetBrainsMono Nerd Font). Set it in your terminal — and in your editor if you want to see the glyphs while editing this file.

git clone https://github.com/mkutz/zsh-github-powerline.git \
  ~/Projects/zsh-github-powerline

Add to your ~/.zshrc:

source ~/Projects/zsh-github-powerline/zsh-github-powerline.plugin.zsh

zsh-github-powerline.plugin.zsh loads github.zsh from the same directory automatically. Restart your shell (exec zsh).

# zinit
zinit light mkutz/zsh-github-powerline

# antidote (add to your plugins file)
mkutz/zsh-github-powerline

# oh-my-zsh
git clone https://github.com/mkutz/zsh-github-powerline.git \
  "$ZSH_CUSTOM/plugins/zsh-github-powerline"
# then add `zsh-github-powerline` to plugins=(...)

All settings are plain variables. The simplest approach is to edit them at the top of the two files; or set them after sourcing to override.

Glyphs (need a Nerd Font). In zsh-github-powerline.plugin.zsh: PL_SEP, PL_FOLDER, PL_BRANCH, PL_STAGED, PL_MODIFIED, PL_UNTRACKED, PL_AHEAD, PL_BEHIND, PL_CROSS, PL_IDE_VSCODE, PL_IDE_IDEA, PL_TIMER, PL_CLOCK. In github.zsh: PL_GH_REF_BRANCH/PR/DRAFT/DETACHED, PL_GH_BUILD_OK/FAIL/WIP/WAIT, PL_GH_PR_ICON, and the attention icons PL_GH_REVIEW_ICON, PL_GH_MINE_ICON, PL_GH_READY_ICON, PL_GH_CHANGES_ICON.

Some glyph variables ship empty — paste your preferred Nerd Font icons into them. Until you do, that item shows its count with no icon.

Colors (256-color codes): PL_EXIT_BG/FG, PL_DIR_BG/FG, PL_IDE_BG/FG, PL_GIT_CLEAN_BG, PL_GIT_DIRTY_BG, PL_GIT_FG, PL_DUR_FG, PL_CLOCK_FG.

Behavior

• GitHub host is github.com only (GitHub Enterprise isn't detected yet).
• The open-in-IDE glyph relies on each IDE's URL handler. VS Code's (vscode://file/…) opens the folder reliably; since VS Code leaves no per-project marker on disk, its glyph appears in any git repo when VS Code is installed (toggle with PL_HAVE_VSCODE). IntelliJ has no URL to open a project by path (IDEA-65879 is shelved), so the glyph uses jetbrains://idea/navigate/reference?project=… — it focuses a project IntelliJ already knows by name and needs the jetbrains:// handler that JetBrains Toolbox registers.
• The "attention" data is repo-wide but cached per branch, so the first prompt on a freshly checked-out branch refetches it.
• Uses the GitHub search API for exact counts, which has a lower rate limit; the PL_GH_TTL cache keeps requests well within it.

Tests are offline and deterministic — no network or gh auth required:

zsh test/test.zsh               # syntax, functions, remote parsing, rendering
zsh test/test-build-states.zsh  # build states + attention report (stubbed gh)

test-build-states.zsh replaces gh with a stub that feeds canned JSON through the same --jq filters the code uses (via jq), then asserts both the cache contents and the exact glyphs/links rendered for each state. CI runs both suites plus zsh -n linting on Linux and macOS for every push and PR.

Apache-2.0 © Michael Kutz