How to colorify git errors, warnings and fatal messages?

Question

When troubleshooting git issues of users, I keep running into people not noticing error/warning messages from git, and then burning their fingers. Is there any way to colorify errors and warnings git outputs?

Answer 1

Since I didn't find a suitable way to color error messages, my solution is to add an additional warning when git returns an error code (!=0).

To do it, add this to your ~/.bashrc or ~/.bash_profile

# Wrap git. On errors, print an additional line in red.
git(){
    command git "$@"
    local exitCode=$?
    if [ $exitCode -ne 0 ]; then
        printf "33[0;31mERROR: git exited with code $exitCode33[0m
"
        return $exitCode
    fi
}

Here is the result:

Note that coloring stderr in red does not work very well because git logs many things in stderr, not only errors. And some errors are output in standard output.