[kelnos]

The issue is that you don't really see the git dirty/clean status, because you are rarely/never inside the actual git working tree on your machine. I manage my dotfiles with a simple script that symlinks, and when I go and edit one of those files (through the symlink), I'm either editing from my homedir, or from the directory containing the symlink. When the edit is done, I don't see any git status, because I'm not inside the git repo working tree.

I end up with the same issue as OP: months and months later I'll pop into ~/.dotfiles (where I keep the git repo), and see the tree is dirty, with all these random changes I've made that I don't really remember all that well.

The difference for me vs. the OP is that I consider it a minor inconvenience, spend a few minutes cleaning up and committing, and go about my day. It also helps that I'm pretty much a single-machine guy. I have the dotfiles on random server-like machines in my house, but I basically never edit them on those machines; all edits happen on my laptop, so I never have a problem with conflicts. I could definitely see how this could get annoying for people who edit their dotfiles on several different machines.

[duskdozer]

For this, I just added a section to my prompt (bash) showing the state of my dotfiles repo (using yadm). This made sense to me because I'd already done this for a git repo in my current dir. I originally rolled my own but eventually found https://github.com/romkatv/gitstatus which is much faster. So, along with background fetches/pushes, at any point I can tell what revision my dotfiles repo is on and whether it's clean, up to date, conflicted, etc. The time cost for my whole prompt is <20ms.