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Rabbit Holes

How to make git status run faster

· 2 min read

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Last week I finally couldn’t take waiting for my starship prompt to render anymore.

After running starship timings I found that git status was taking over 150 ms to run each time! Thankfully, there are two git settings that can speed this up. After enabling fsmonitor and untrackedCache my git status time went down to 50 ms.

To enable them, just run these two commands.

Terminal window
git config --global core.fsmonitor true
git config --global core.untrackedCache true

Voilà! You’ve significantly sped up git status(and anything that calls it — starship, lazygit, etc.) in large repos.

Settings in Detail

core.fsmonitor

  • Starts a background daemon that hooks into OS filesystem events (FSEvents on macOS) to track what files changed. Instead of walking the entire working tree on every git status, git just asks the daemon “what changed since last time?”
  • Requires git 2.36+.
  • Only works on local filesystems (not NFS, Docker mounts, etc.).
  • Starts lazily per-repo on first git command — no manual intervention needed.

core.untrackedCache

  • Caches the list of untracked files between runs so git doesn’t rescan the tree every time.
  • Works best in combination with fsmonitor.
  • The cache is invalidated automatically when files change.

Checking & Starting the Daemon

To make sure the filesystem monitor is actually running, you can check its status. In my case, I had to manually start it for some reason.

Terminal window
git fsmonitor--daemon status   # check if running in current repo
git fsmonitor--daemon start    # manually start if needed
git status                     # run once to warm the cache after starting