Git auto-fetch

Automatically fetches all changes from all remotes while you are working in a git-initialized directory.

To use it, add git-auto-fetch to the plugins array in your zshrc file:

plugins=(... git-auto-fetch)

Usage

Every time the command prompt is shown all remotes will be fetched in the background. By default, git-auto-fetch will be triggered only if the last auto-fetch was done at least 60 seconds ago. You can change the fetch interval in your .zshrc:

GIT_AUTO_FETCH_INTERVAL=1200 # in seconds

A log of git-fetch-all will be saved in .git/FETCH_LOG.

Toggle auto-fetch per folder

If you are using a mobile connection or for any other reason you can disable git-auto-fetch for any folder:

$ cd to/your/project
$ git-auto-fetch
disabled
$ git-auto-fetch
enabled

Caveats

Automatically fetching all changes defeats the purpose of git push --force-with-lease, and makes it behave like git push --force in some cases. For example:

Consider that you made some changes and possibly rebased some stuff, which means you'll need to use --force-with-lease to overwrite the remote history of a branch. Between the time when you make the changes (maybe do a git log) and the time when you git push, it's possible that someone else updates the branch you're working on.

If git-auto-fetch triggers then, you'll have fetched the remote changes without knowing it, and even though you're running the push with --force-with-lease, git will overwrite the recent changes because you already have them in your local repository. The git push --force-with-lease docs talk about possible solutions to this problem.

Uh oh!