Improving Git Diffs

Word-wise diffs with colors and syntax highlighting.

Git diff, word-colored

Default git

The default git diff is rather lackluster since it only displays which lines changed, not how they changed:

Git diff, default

This is especially bad when the lines are long, or there are a lot of very similar lines:

Long lines and repetition with default diff

One solution is looking at diffs using GitHub or GitLab, both of which highlight the specific words that changed. This is a lot nicer, but it obviously doesn’t run in the terminal, requires you to be online, and only works with repos that are hosted on the website (and up to date).

GitHub word-coloring

Thankfully, there is a way to get the same behavior without any of the negatives.

Diff Highlighters

Here is the “long lines” example from before, word-colored by a command line tool, compared to the default diff:

Long lines and repetition, default vs word-colored

This output was produced by diffr, which is most likely available from your operating system’s package manager of choice.

There are other, more powerful options below, but diffr gives the cleanest output by default.

To make Git use diffr, edit your .gitconfig to include the following:

# .gitconfig
[pager]
  # Use `diffr` (make sure it is installed).
  log = diffr | less
  show = diffr | less
  diff = diffr | less

Syntax Highlighting

One thing is still missing when compared to GitHub — Syntax highlighting.

Using delta gives you that and much more. The defaults do not look very good, which is why delta is not the first option I suggested, but it is incredibly customizable.

Here is what it looks like using default settings:

`delta` code diff

Here is a diff using my custom settings:

Diff with custom `delta` settings

Delta also supports side-by-side diffs:

Side-by-side diff (default settings)

To make Git use delta, edit your .gitconfig to include the following:

# .gitconfig
[pager]
  # Use `delta`.
  log = delta
  show = delta
  diff = delta

Other Alternatives

For the sake of being thorough, here are some other diff highlighters. These rely on a less accurate algorithm for generating the highlights, so they are generally not recommended.

diff-highlight word-coloring

Git is actually bundled a tool — diff-highlight (except on Mac, which thus ships an incomplete Git installation. Sighhh, Apple🤦) (brew install git solves this).

You can usually find and add it to $PATH at /usr/local/share/git/contrib/diff-highlight/.
Then, edit your .gitconfig:

# .gitconfig
[pager]
  # Use `diff-highlight` (make sure it is in `$PATH`).
  log = diff-highlight | less
  show = diff-highlight | less
  diff = diff-highlight | less

Finally, you can check out diff-so-fancy (which uses diff-highlight under the hood):

diff-so-fancy

Final Words

Hope this was useful.

Please feel free to reach out on Twitter for any reason.