How can I get 'git status' to always use short format?

Starting git1.8.4 (July 2013), you can configure git status to use short by default.
See commit 50e4f757f4adda096239c1ad60499cf606bf2c6f:

Some people always run 'git status -s'.
The configuration variable status.short allows to set it by default.

So:

git config status.short true

And you would be all set!

Ben Allred adds in the comments:

A quick test shows that git config status.branch true works as well, to show the branch information in conjunction with short-format.

It was reversed for a time:

Commit 908a0e6b98e5a7c4b299b3643823bdefb4fa512e:

It makes it impossible to "git commit" when status.short is set, and also "git status --porcelain" output is affected by status.branch.

But it is now back, still for git 1.8.4 (July/August 2013)

See commit f0915cbaf476d63f72c284057680809ed24fbe0d:

commit: make it work with status.short

With "status.short" set, it is now impossible to commit with status.short set, because it acts like "git commit --short", and it is impossible to differentiate between a status_format set by the command-line option parser versus that set by the config parser.

To alleviate this problem, clear status_format as soon as the config parser has finished its work.

Signed-off-by: Ramkumar Ramachandra

Use a different alias. Instead of trying to alias 'status', do:

git config --global alias.s 'status --short'

Now "git s" gives you short output, and "git status" givesyou long output.

You may create an alias.

But I'd create bash script:

#!/bin/bashgit status --short

save this script in ~/bin/gits (or /usr/bin/gits and chmod 555), so typing gits gives what you want.