When studying the code, I was nerd-sniped by the commit message of 4d2292e9a9 (status: refactor colopts handling, 2012-05-07) as I did not understand why it was so important to reset the s.colopts to 0 in builtin/commit.c. In my adolescent hybris I nearly sent out a patch claiming that line to be useless and wrong, but then I studied a bit more. After the background story became clear, I decided to "just write the missing piece", how hard can it be? I would consider the following three patches a hack, but they work. You can have untracked files in column mode in the commented text for a commit. Thanks, Stefan Stefan Beller (3): column.c: pass column_options to down to display_plain column: allow for custom printf WIP - Allow custom printf function for column printing builtin/commit.c | 1 - column.c | 21 +++++++++++++-------- column.h | 3 +++ wt-status.c | 29 ++++++++++++++++++++++++----- 4 files changed, 40 insertions(+), 14 deletions(-) -- 2.12.2.511.g2abb8caf66