Odd RStudio + git issue: git tab present but empty even when changed files present

[md96]

I'm using RStudio + GitHub for a grad intro stats course. One student has an issue that I have been unable to sort out & have not found in the 20+ posts online about a similar, but slightly different issue.

Basically, after they clone a repo to their pc and open the project in RStudio, the git tab is present, but it is entirely empty. There's no .gitignore in the git tab. When they edit a .Rmd in the Project and hit save, it does not appear in the git tab.

They can "pull" down changes in class repos. But the tab still remains empty. So they have no way to commit or push.

Unlike other students, they are also prompted to enter their github user & pwd to pull updates to cloned repos from inside RStudio, but it works, the updated files appear locally.

They are using a macbook air. Things we've tried and verified.

1. Git is installed. I used which git in terminal & checked the git path in the preferences tab.
2. We set up her SSH key in RStudio & added it to their github (other students didn't have to do this step, but I was desperate)
3. In terminal, they did these steps
   git config --global user.name 'Jane Doe'
git config --global user.email 'jane@example.com'
4. We re-cloned the a class repo, and I opened the project confirming that there was a file, pulled changes just to test the connection, edited a .Rmd, and the changed file still did not show up in the git tab.

Any other suggestions or ideas welcome. Thanks!

[kevinushey]

To confirm, do you see the changed files reported if you run:

git status
git diff

from the terminal?

Also, does the user have any non-ASCII characters in their user account name? (This normally shouldn't be an issue on macOS, but is worth double-checking)

You may also want to generate a diagnostics report, to see if there are any git-related errors reported.

[md96]

Thank you for your suggestion. These will help me in the future.

I had them install the 'usethis' package and send me the results of the 2 commands that summarize the project and related settings. They had her schoolwork folder named 'school!' - I told them to suppress their enthusiasm and remove the ! until the term was over and now it's working as it should.

I had asked about spaces in the file path but not special characters. At least now there is 1 post somewhere on the web describing this behavior, since I could find no other examples before.

[kevinushey]

Thanks for following up! I was able to reproduce the issue for a project that includes ! in its path as well, and have filed an issue for us to take a look here:

git features do not work in directory containing '!'