What is meaning of blue dot in the left gutter in VS Code's integrated terminal?

I am new to Git and working with Git in VS Code. I created some branches and you can see them in the below image

git branches

Why does branch b3 have a blue dot? what does it mean? I use VS Code, can we see this behavior in other editors?

Solution

This looks like the shell integration decorations, but just weirdly misaligned- it's usually aligned to the shell prompt's first line or somewhere near there.

It'll probably disappear if you put "terminal.integrated.shellIntegration.decorationsEnabled": "never" in your settings.json. In older versions of VS Code, the setting takes a boolean instead of a string enum. At the time of this writing, the setting's description from defaultSettings.json says:

// When shell integration is enabled, adds a decoration for each command.
//  - both: Show decorations in the gutter (left) and overview ruler (right)
//  - gutter: Show gutter decorations to the left of the terminal
//  - overviewRuler: Show overview ruler decorations to the right of the terminal
//  - never: Do not show decorations
"terminal.integrated.shellIntegration.decorationsEnabled": "both",

You can also see the release notes that mention shell integration updates (google "site:code.visualstudio.com/updates shell integration"). For example, for 1.65, where it mentions that there are three types of decorations: blue for success, red for error, and empty/grey for default.

Given that I get three different issue tickets as the top search results when googling "github vscode issues shell integration decorations misaligned", I'm not exactly surprised that you're seeing weird behaviours. If you want to help with issue reporting, take a look through existing issues to see if what you're seeing here is covered already or not, and if it isn't, report a new one.