Showing Untracked Files In Status After Creating New Directories In Git

Overview

If you create a directory in a repo and start adding files, when you check the repository status with git status, by default it will just list the new directory and not its files.

Using a special parameter in git status we can see all the files in the new directory we want to stage.

Seeing untracked files

git status has the untracked-files switch where we select which files to see each time we execute git status.

 The mode parameter is used to specify the handling of untracked files. It is optional: it defaults to all, and if specified, it must be stuck to the option (e.g. -uno, but not -u no).
The possible options are:
-no - Show no untracked files.
-normal - Shows untracked files and directories.
-all - Also shows individual files in untracked directories.

Using the --untracked-files=all we see all the files in new directories.

I will create a new directory with some untracked files to see its behaviour:

$ mkdir new_feature
$ touch new_feature/feature_a
$ touch new_feature/feature_b
$ git status
On branch master

Initial commit

Untracked files:
  (use "git add <file>..." to include in what will be committed)

	new_feature/

nothing added to commit but untracked files present (use "git add" to track)

Showing untracked files

Using git status untracked-files=all:

$ git status --untracked-files=all
On branch master

Initial commit

Untracked files:
  (use "git add <file>..." to include in what will be committed)

 new_feature/feature_a
 new_feature/feature_b

nothing added to commit but untracked files present (use "git add" to track)

Now we can stage new files directly.

Setting as the default behaviour

To save this setting, we use git config --global status.showuntrackedfiles all so it will add the following to git configuration in ~/.config:

[status]
	showuntrackedfiles = all

Or we can just add the above code manually to ~/.config.

References

• Git status documentation https://git-scm.com/docs/git-status#git-status--ultmodegt
• Choose files to stage of a new directory with magit in Emacs