The vim-fugitive plugin can show a
git summary window that is "akin to git-status". There are two ways to open up
this window.
The short-hand way of doing this is with :G (or :Git) with no arguments.
For me, this opens the fugitive-summary in a split.
The other way is with the :Gedit command. This command can take a variety of
arguments, and when you pass it : as an argument, it will open a window with
the fugitive-summary (i.e. :Gedit :).
I tend to short-hand this as :Ge:.
See :h fugitive-summary and :h fugitive-object for more details on this.