Diff So Fancy: make Git diffs look good (opens in new tab)

(github.com)

270 pointsaram10y ago107 comments

107 comments

A personal pet peeve of mine when reading diffs, is when a file has some functions and you insert one and instead of looking like this:

     int someOldFunction()
     {
         // Function body
     }
    +
    +int newFunction()
    +{
    +    // New function body
    +}

It looks like this:

     int someOldFunction()
     {
         // Function body
    +}
    +
    +int newFunction()
    +{
    +    // New function body
     }

It's a small thing, but given that these diffs are equivalent, the one that balances the curly braces within added blocks should be favored. But diff utilities seem to get this pretty consistently wrong.

Klathmon10y ago

It is a small thing, but it throws me off everytime i see it, and then it takes a few seconds of looking around before it dawns on me what happened.

The "user" in me would love a language aware diffing (and merging) system, but the developer in me is already groaning about how much work that would end up taking for arguably not that much benefit.

alexvoda10y ago

Maybe this will help: https://www.semanticmerge.com/

3 more replies

digikata10y ago

I think it might be easier to get to a syntax-aware diff if one approached it reusing the language specific syntax highlighting specs used in various editors. I've almost sat down to start that myself a few times.

skybrian10y ago

I don't think it has to be truly language aware. A diff tool that looks for matched braces, quotes, and indents to figure out where the blocks are would do better most of the time.

1 more reply

stormbrew10y ago

    git diff --patience

might give you better results? I've seen this pattern too, but I can't find a reproduction of normal git diff giving it to me at the moment.

stock_toaster10y ago

I use this in my ~/.gitconfig

   [diff]
   algorithm = patience

paulirish10y ago

I've experimented with patience diff, but not seen it deliver reliably superior results than myers (the current default).

1 more reply

FaceKicker10y ago

I tried GP's example, and in this particular case both --patience and the default (Myers) work the same, both doing the thing you want them to. Which perplexes me, because I know I've seen the bad case too, but can't seem to find a minimal example of it (I tried a couple variations on the example; they all did the 'right' thing).

DannyBee10y ago

That's because they all use greedy O(ND) algorithms or equivalent.

But conceptually, no matter what the algorithm, the greediness is usually a requirement to maintaining the theoretical time bound of LCS based algorithms.

Patience trades the time bound for "better" results (patience is worst case O(ND^2).

Histogram is a neatly engineered and extended version of patience with an O(ND) timebound (and in fact, is faster than both myers and patience while providing good patience-like output).

whalesalad10y ago

Clojure (lisp) is even more fucky because adding a single outer form can re-indent (and therefore modify) an entire huge block of code.

At least on GitHub we have the ?w=1 URL parameter on PRs which helps a bit.

wldlyinaccurate10y ago

Protip: ?w=1 on GitHub is synonymous with git-diff's -w flag.

piyush_soni10y ago

I find Araxis Merge especially useful in these times. This application has a feature to "set the synchronization link" at any place you want in the code. It is not automatic (or language aware), but once you realize the difference, you can 'fix' the diff in real time. That helped me a lot for big diff files (unfortunately in my current company we don't use Araxis :( )

cyphar10y ago

diff --patience uses a different algorithm that works to optimise the diffed number of lines (it's less efficient though), which will probably solve your issue (the way the standard algorithm works is to essentially find common features on a first-come-first-served basis.

masklinn10y ago

The two diffs have exactly the same number of lines here, the difference is which lines are selected as part of the insertion.

paulirish10y ago

[I'm the author of diff-so-fancy, Steve helped with shipping it as a standalone script]

NPM?!? :)

A lot of people below are asking why a bash script (that depends on a perl script) is being recommended to install via NPM? The short reason is that NPM is the most straightforward way to get a script installed as a global binary in a cross-platform manner. This approach has worked quite well with `git-open`[0]. Asking all users to deal with the PATH is not my ideal.

In addition, I wanted a reasonable upgrade path, in case there are neccessary bugfixes. It's not a great experience if users identify bugs but the fix means they manually find it/download/PATH-ify each time. :/

That said, I'll add some Manual Install instructions to the readme so it's clear how to do this on your own. :) ( Edit: Here they are… https://github.com/stevemao/diff-so-fancy/blob/master/readme... )

[0] https://github.com/paulirish/git-open

Manishearth10y ago

> That said, I'll add some Manual Install instructions to the readme so it's clear how to do this on your own

Yeah, that helps a lot :)

I saw this, was like "cool, I want to use this", and then noted that it uses npm. I avoid installing ruby and node apps -- I have nothing against either, just that I currently don't use either language or have a dependency on a major tool written in those; but they pull in a lot of deps which take up space (at least, my experiences have been that many of these tools install way too much -- probably because I don't use either and all the "default libs" aren't on my system). On my previous machine I had lots of issues with this, so as a rule I avoid these things unless absolutely necessary. I know others who are of a similar opinion.

Fortunately I realized that it was just a shell script, and installed it directly :)

satbyy10y ago

> The short reason is that NPM is the most straightforward way to get a script installed as a global binary in a cross-platform manner

Really ? All Unix-like systems (incl OS X) can do this:

    /usr/bin/install myscript.sh /usr/local/bin

PS: Oh, just realized that there is npm uninstall as well, but not /usr/bin/uninstall (though it's just rm -f anyway)

goldbrick10y ago

`install` isn't package management, or anything close to that.

viraptor10y ago

Or use FPM (https://github.com/jordansissel/fpm/wiki) and abstract the whole packaging idea. linux and mac packages supported.

stevemao10y ago

I see a lot of projects that's written in other languages on npm, especially bash. Substack even published c code to npm. I think it makes the script more accessible especially for nodejs users. I don't mind publishing it to other package mangers.

txutxu10y ago

Please do not confuse 'more accessible specially for', with 'less accessible and exclusively for' nodejs users.

hobarrera10y ago

Last I tried, npm didn't even work on IPv6, even if there's some transition mechanism in place (eg: NAT64).

It's really pretty awful as a distribution mechanism. Why not a simple Makefile?

gkya10y ago

I had no reasons to use this package, but now I have one to not use it. I only wanted to see what it was because the name suggested something fun.

Why whould someone who can't add $HOME/bin to $PATH be using git?

argonaut10y ago

I realize your question is rhetorical, but there are tons of people. Anyone new to programming, in a CS course that uses git, for example, would be familiar with basic git but many would be unfamiliar with the path (or on Windows).

1 more reply

crottypeter10y ago

git is a content tracker.

People who don't need to edit PATH might still need to track content.

1 more reply

semi-extrinsic10y ago

Wouldn't it be easier for the end user if you used pip/PyPi? Essentially all Linux distros include Python, but there are very few that ship with Node.js installed by default.

LyndsySimon10y ago

I can only speak for myself, but my systems all prohibit installation of packages into the system Python namespace by default.

2 more replies

goldbrick10y ago

And most of distros don't come with pip, so we're back at square one.

1 more reply

phinnaeus10y ago

It looks like the diff-so-fancy script is bash, and the diff-highlight script is perl. Why is it set up in npm? WTF?

lucideer10y ago

There's no easy install methods for small simple scripts that doesn't involve multiple manual steps, have an automated upgrade path, is cross platform and is consistent+familiar to a large subset of developers.

Of the options out there for the above, npm - while hassle if you don't have it already installed - is probably the closest balance of maintainer and end-developer convenience.

phinnaeus10y ago

Thanks for the explanation! I went ahead and installed npm to use this, I think it's a pretty nifty little utility and worth it.

hobarrera10y ago

make install?

1 more reply

Grue310y ago

So that it's web-scale, obviously.

hueving10y ago

And you use maven to build it.

squiguy710y ago

Why do I need NPM to install this? I guess I will just have to manually get and link them...

jdimov1010y ago

Because there's been this NPM virus infecting our systems over the past few years. It has been disgusing itself as a useful utility.

Scarblac10y ago

I'm going to assume that is a typo for disgusting.

1 more reply

chaitanya10y ago

Might be better to link to the source directly: https://github.com/paulirish/dotfiles/blob/master/bin/diff-s...

FiloSottile10y ago

If you don't want your diff so fancy (pun intended, and I'm sorry) but you still want the inline highlights, the script comes with git (https://github.com/git/git/tree/master/contrib/diff-highligh...):

    ln -sf "$(brew --prefix)/share/git-core/contrib/diff-highlight/diff-highlight" ~/bin/diff-highlight

and add to .gitconfig

    [pager]
            log = diff-highlight | less
            show = diff-highlight | less
            diff = diff-highlight | less

pierrebeaucamp10y ago

I know he gave credit in the README, but why does this ~30 line shell script need its own repo? Seems more like a cheap grab for Github Stars rather than to provide actual value.

Edit: Even the screenshot is from Paul...

paulirish10y ago

A bit ago, I had indicated this script should be more accessible than copying two separate files out of my dotfiles repo: https://github.com/paulirish/dotfiles/blob/master/bin/diff-s...

Steve took the initiative to put this in it's own repo. Seems okay; I was being rather slow to ship it for real.

pierrebeaucamp10y ago

All good then ;)

ceejayoz10y ago

Sheesh. The repo allows the stuff like installing it via `npm install -g diff-so-fancy`. It's not like a public repo costs anything, and Github stars don't get you anything either.

stevemao10y ago

I think it makes it easier to add contributors. Git doesn't allow a user partially access a repo so Paul would add a few people only contributing on one script. I added some really talented contributors :) The repo under my name doesn't mean it belongs to me. In fact it belongs to the public. Everyone can contribute to it so everyone is the "owner". That's how I see open source projects. I don't mind giving it back to Paul. I did it only because I needed it. I believe a lot of people would want it more accessible too.

jrochkind110y ago

Why doesn't any code you are using need it's own repo, to track history, what does it matter how short it is?

finnn10y ago

So, the whole npm thing seems weird to me, then it occurred to me that it could be for malicious purposes. Would it be possible to upload a separate package.json to npm that had eg a post-install script? I don't know much about how npm works from the package publication side of things, but I assumed it was similar to pypi where the code in the git repo doesn't have to be at all related to the code in the package

timtadh10y ago

    git diff --word-diff=color

provides a really nice word diff with coloring similar to this project. Just setup an alias in your global gitconfig:

    [alias]
            cdiff = diff --word-diff=color

landr0id10y ago

Looks good, but why does it use npm for installation?

ascorbic10y ago

Right: the package.json is almost as long as the script itself.

moonlighter10y ago

Because Paul says so in the original source on line 34...

https://github.com/paulirish/dotfiles/blob/master/bin/diff-s...

izolate10y ago

Remove contextual +/- in favour of colour highlights? As a person with red-green colourblindness all I can say is: Lol. Nope.

scrollaway10y ago

You know you can customize the diff colors, yes?

From the git book itself: `git config --global color.diff.meta "blue black bold"`

brokentone10y ago

That's a helpful perspective, but hopefully you already have workarounds on the color issue. This is simply making diff pieces easier to copy / pasta -- which I for one have needed to do. Change my mind on a refactor midstream, need to restore part of the file, etc.

tomjakubowski10y ago

You might investigate the tools your editor of choice provides for working with diffs. You might be surprised at how easy it can be!

(In Emacs, if you're using git, magit is an amazing package. You can select a commit from the logs, dive into the diff for a file caused by that commit, highlight a region of the diff and revert the change in your working copy. It's wonderful.)

1 more reply

mschuster9110y ago

what I'd like to see is that a/b in front of the filenames disappear. Getting rid of that would FINALLY allow me to double-click on the filename (which is configured to select the part between the spaces and copy it to the clipboard) and paste it instantly for the next command... or to be able to do git diff > foo.patch and on another system do patch < foo.patch without having to remember the correct -p value.

datashaman10y ago

git diff --no-prefix

oabm10y ago

What happened to this line from the second file in the screenshot?

  -        var optionsGlassPane = new WebInspector.GlassPane(document);

An important part of viewing diffs for me is seeing what the old code was.

makecheck10y ago

I handle this in a way that is more agnostic to the type of revision control, and fully flexible in coloring (using the most powerful scheme available).

For example, I shouldn't have to put up with basic colors if the terminal can do better.

Here is how it works; starting with:

  #!/bin/bash 
  if [ -r ".svn" ] ; then
    exec svn diff ${1+"$@"} | my_colorize_diff
  else
    git diff ${1+"$@"} | my_colorize_diff
  fi

...where the "my_colorize_diff" script at the end of the pipe is as follows:

  #!/usr/bin/env perl
  # by Kevin Grant (kmg@mac.com)
  my $term_program = (exists $ENV{'TERM_PROGRAM'} && defined $ENV{'TERM_PROGRAM'}) ? $ENV{'TERM_PROGRAM'} : '';
  my $term = (exists $ENV{'TERM'} && defined $ENV{'TERM'}) ? $ENV{'TERM'} : 'vt100';
  my $is_xterm = ($term =~ /xterm/);
  my $is_24bit = ($term_program =~ /MacTerm/);
  print "\033#3BEGIN DIFF\n";
  print "\033#4BEGIN DIFF\n\033#5";
  while (<>) {
    if (/^\+/ && !/^\+\+/) {
      if ($is_24bit) {
        print "\033[48:2:150:200:150m", "\033[2K", "\033[38:2::88:m", "\033[1m";
      } elsif ($is_xterm) {
        print "\033[48;5;149m", "\033[2K", "\033[38;5;235m", "\033[1m";
      } else {
        print "\033[42m", "\033[2K", "\033[30m", "\033[1m";
      }
    } elsif (/^\-/ && !/^\-\-/) {
      if ($is_24bit) {
        print "\033[48:2:244:150:150m", "\033[2K", "\033[38:2:144:0::m";
      } elsif ($is_xterm) {
        print "\033[48;5;52m", "\033[2K", "\033[38;5;124m";
      } else {
        print "\033[41m", "\033[2K", "\033[37m";
      }
    } else {
      print "\033[3m";
    }
    chomp;
    print;
    print "\033[0m\n";
  }
  print "\033#3END DIFF\n";
  print "\033#4END DIFF\n\033#5";

thristian10y ago

For what it's worth, there's a lot of 24-bit-capable terminals that aren't MacTerm. Even xterm supports the 24-bit-color sequences, although it picks the closest entry in its 256-colour palette rather than using the 24-bit colour directly.

Also, you seem to be assuming "xterm" supports 256 colours and everything else doesn't. The best way to figure out how many colours the terminal supports is $(tput colours). tput also looks up other useful sequences; you can "tput bold" to turn on bold mode, "tput setaf 12" to set the foreground to colour 12 (bright yellow), "tput sgr0" to zero all active formatting, etc.

makecheck10y ago

Good point. Although, unless there are shells that have "tput" built-in, that means more subprocesses to obtain basic information (which would slow down the result a bit). In my case, the environment is sufficient to figure out what to do.

jfountain201510y ago

Nice improvement to diff but I think I'll still use `git difftool` with Diffmerge https://sourcegear.com/diffmerge/

hobarrera10y ago

I didn't quite like this, put it does reference diff-hightlight, which is part of git-contrib (so it may already be installed on your system, but just not in your $PATH!):

https://github.com/git/git/tree/master/contrib/diff-highligh...

For example, here's a diff where it improved readability enormously:

https://i.imgur.com/8iQNaeu.png

hobarrera10y ago

Yes, the code in that sample is horrible triplicate. Please ignore that.

felipesabino10y ago

I have an alias for the diff params bellow, which has basically the same visual result, without the need to install anything.

  $ git diff --color --color-words --abbrev

_ZeD_10y ago

what are the advantages over colordiff[0]? (or a graphic differ like kdiff3[1])

[0] http://www.colordiff.org/ [1] http://kdiff3.sourceforge.net/

tremguy10y ago

> No pesky + or - at line-stars, making for easier copy-paste.

I wonder if easing copypasting is a good or bad thing..

mrinterweb10y ago

Vim's fugitive plugin also gives a similar split diff view. The command is "Gdiff".

ilikepi10y ago

Even without the plugin, you can spawn a diff in vim via git's difftool settings. Here's a basic version that can be used in one's .gitconfig:

    [diff]
      tool = customvim
    [difftool "customvim"]
      cmd = vim -R -f -d \"$LOCAL\" \"$REMOTE\"

stevemao10y ago

We've grown and it's out of control. diff-so-fancy moved to an org!!! https://github.com/so-fancy/diff-so-fancy

nikolay10y ago

I find icdiff [0] (Improved Colored Diff) better.

[0]: https://github.com/jeffkaufman

GreaterFool10y ago

Is there any language aware diff tool? I think I saw some commercial product for Java but other than that I haven't seen any attempts to do that.

samuell10y ago

When writing manuscripts in git, my favourite "trick" is git diff --word-diff (of course aliased to git wdiff).

module1710y ago

It looks so good and real, I kept hitting `q` whilst looking at the image.

nqzero10y ago

the netbeans.team.diff tool is similar (showing the specific words that changed), allows interactive editing, and does a good job even with large insertions and deletions

AdmiralAsshat10y ago

So what does this offer over simply using vimdiff?

merb10y ago

this doesn't look useful. the left one is just fine. for everything else you wouldn't need a cli diff tool...

nqzero10y ago

when one or 2 words change in a long or dense line, it's nice to have the specific changes highlighted

imagine a for loop in which a variable (used on every line) was renamed, and buried in the loop an assignment changed slightly (eg, + became -). with a standard diff, it's really hard (for me) to pick up the minor change. with word by word diffs, it's pretty easy

(i use netbeans diff, not this tool, but they appear similar)

djur10y ago

git has built-in word diffing with --word-diff, though. --word-diff=color does almost exactly the same thing.

1 more reply

Animats10y ago

Hurts. Hurts bad. Tiny type in many primary colors on a black background. 1985 called, it wants its screen layout back.

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse

107 comments

jimrandomh10y ago

A personal pet peeve of mine when reading diffs, is when a file has some functions and you insert one and instead of looking like this:

     int someOldFunction()
     {
         // Function body
     }
    +
    +int newFunction()
    +{
    +    // New function body
    +}

It looks like this:

     int someOldFunction()
     {
         // Function body
    +}
    +
    +int newFunction()
    +{
    +    // New function body
     }

Klathmon10y ago

It is a small thing, but it throws me off everytime i see it, and then it takes a few seconds of looking around before it dawns on me what happened.

The "user" in me would love a language aware diffing (and merging) system, but the developer in me is already groaning about how much work that would end up taking for arguably not that much benefit.

alexvoda10y ago

Maybe this will help: https://www.semanticmerge.com/

3 more replies

digikata10y ago

skybrian10y ago

I don't think it has to be truly language aware. A diff tool that looks for matched braces, quotes, and indents to figure out where the blocks are would do better most of the time.

1 more reply

stormbrew10y ago

    git diff --patience

might give you better results? I've seen this pattern too, but I can't find a reproduction of normal git diff giving it to me at the moment.

stock_toaster10y ago

I use this in my ~/.gitconfig

   [diff]
   algorithm = patience

paulirish10y ago

I've experimented with patience diff, but not seen it deliver reliably superior results than myers (the current default).

1 more reply

FaceKicker10y ago

DannyBee10y ago

That's because they all use greedy O(ND) algorithms or equivalent.

But conceptually, no matter what the algorithm, the greediness is usually a requirement to maintaining the theoretical time bound of LCS based algorithms.

Patience trades the time bound for "better" results (patience is worst case O(ND^2).

Histogram is a neatly engineered and extended version of patience with an O(ND) timebound (and in fact, is faster than both myers and patience while providing good patience-like output).

whalesalad10y ago

Clojure (lisp) is even more fucky because adding a single outer form can re-indent (and therefore modify) an entire huge block of code.

At least on GitHub we have the ?w=1 URL parameter on PRs which helps a bit.

wldlyinaccurate10y ago

Protip: ?w=1 on GitHub is synonymous with git-diff's -w flag.

piyush_soni10y ago

cyphar10y ago

masklinn10y ago

The two diffs have exactly the same number of lines here, the difference is which lines are selected as part of the insertion.

paulirish10y ago

[I'm the author of diff-so-fancy, Steve helped with shipping it as a standalone script]

NPM?!? :)

[0] https://github.com/paulirish/git-open

Manishearth10y ago

> That said, I'll add some Manual Install instructions to the readme so it's clear how to do this on your own

Yeah, that helps a lot :)

Fortunately I realized that it was just a shell script, and installed it directly :)

satbyy10y ago

> The short reason is that NPM is the most straightforward way to get a script installed as a global binary in a cross-platform manner

Really ? All Unix-like systems (incl OS X) can do this:

    /usr/bin/install myscript.sh /usr/local/bin

PS: Oh, just realized that there is npm uninstall as well, but not /usr/bin/uninstall (though it's just rm -f anyway)

goldbrick10y ago

`install` isn't package management, or anything close to that.

viraptor10y ago

Or use FPM (https://github.com/jordansissel/fpm/wiki) and abstract the whole packaging idea. linux and mac packages supported.

stevemao10y ago

txutxu10y ago

Please do not confuse 'more accessible specially for', with 'less accessible and exclusively for' nodejs users.

hobarrera10y ago

Last I tried, npm didn't even work on IPv6, even if there's some transition mechanism in place (eg: NAT64).

It's really pretty awful as a distribution mechanism. Why not a simple Makefile?

gkya10y ago

I had no reasons to use this package, but now I have one to not use it. I only wanted to see what it was because the name suggested something fun.

Why whould someone who can't add $HOME/bin to $PATH be using git?

argonaut10y ago

1 more reply

crottypeter10y ago

git is a content tracker.

People who don't need to edit PATH might still need to track content.

1 more reply

semi-extrinsic10y ago

Wouldn't it be easier for the end user if you used pip/PyPi? Essentially all Linux distros include Python, but there are very few that ship with Node.js installed by default.

LyndsySimon10y ago

I can only speak for myself, but my systems all prohibit installation of packages into the system Python namespace by default.

2 more replies

goldbrick10y ago

And most of distros don't come with pip, so we're back at square one.

1 more reply

phinnaeus10y ago

It looks like the diff-so-fancy script is bash, and the diff-highlight script is perl. Why is it set up in npm? WTF?

lucideer10y ago

Of the options out there for the above, npm - while hassle if you don't have it already installed - is probably the closest balance of maintainer and end-developer convenience.

phinnaeus10y ago

Thanks for the explanation! I went ahead and installed npm to use this, I think it's a pretty nifty little utility and worth it.

hobarrera10y ago

make install?

1 more reply

Grue310y ago

So that it's web-scale, obviously.

hueving10y ago

And you use maven to build it.

squiguy710y ago

Why do I need NPM to install this? I guess I will just have to manually get and link them...

jdimov1010y ago

Because there's been this NPM virus infecting our systems over the past few years. It has been disgusing itself as a useful utility.

Scarblac10y ago

I'm going to assume that is a typo for disgusting.

1 more reply

chaitanya10y ago

Might be better to link to the source directly: https://github.com/paulirish/dotfiles/blob/master/bin/diff-s...

FiloSottile10y ago

    ln -sf "$(brew --prefix)/share/git-core/contrib/diff-highlight/diff-highlight" ~/bin/diff-highlight

and add to .gitconfig

    [pager]
            log = diff-highlight | less
            show = diff-highlight | less
            diff = diff-highlight | less

pierrebeaucamp10y ago

I know he gave credit in the README, but why does this ~30 line shell script need its own repo? Seems more like a cheap grab for Github Stars rather than to provide actual value.

Edit: Even the screenshot is from Paul...

paulirish10y ago

A bit ago, I had indicated this script should be more accessible than copying two separate files out of my dotfiles repo: https://github.com/paulirish/dotfiles/blob/master/bin/diff-s...

Steve took the initiative to put this in it's own repo. Seems okay; I was being rather slow to ship it for real.

pierrebeaucamp10y ago

All good then ;)

ceejayoz10y ago

Sheesh. The repo allows the stuff like installing it via `npm install -g diff-so-fancy`. It's not like a public repo costs anything, and Github stars don't get you anything either.

stevemao10y ago

jrochkind110y ago

Why doesn't any code you are using need it's own repo, to track history, what does it matter how short it is?

finnn10y ago

timtadh10y ago

    git diff --word-diff=color

provides a really nice word diff with coloring similar to this project. Just setup an alias in your global gitconfig:

    [alias]
            cdiff = diff --word-diff=color

landr0id10y ago

Looks good, but why does it use npm for installation?

ascorbic10y ago

Right: the package.json is almost as long as the script itself.

moonlighter10y ago

Because Paul says so in the original source on line 34...

https://github.com/paulirish/dotfiles/blob/master/bin/diff-s...

izolate10y ago

Remove contextual +/- in favour of colour highlights? As a person with red-green colourblindness all I can say is: Lol. Nope.

scrollaway10y ago

You know you can customize the diff colors, yes?

From the git book itself: `git config --global color.diff.meta "blue black bold"`

brokentone10y ago

tomjakubowski10y ago

You might investigate the tools your editor of choice provides for working with diffs. You might be surprised at how easy it can be!

1 more reply

mschuster9110y ago

datashaman10y ago

git diff --no-prefix

oabm10y ago

What happened to this line from the second file in the screenshot?

  -        var optionsGlassPane = new WebInspector.GlassPane(document);

An important part of viewing diffs for me is seeing what the old code was.

makecheck10y ago

I handle this in a way that is more agnostic to the type of revision control, and fully flexible in coloring (using the most powerful scheme available).

For example, I shouldn't have to put up with basic colors if the terminal can do better.

Here is how it works; starting with:

  #!/bin/bash 
  if [ -r ".svn" ] ; then
    exec svn diff ${1+"$@"} | my_colorize_diff
  else
    git diff ${1+"$@"} | my_colorize_diff
  fi

...where the "my_colorize_diff" script at the end of the pipe is as follows:

  #!/usr/bin/env perl
  # by Kevin Grant (kmg@mac.com)
  my $term_program = (exists $ENV{'TERM_PROGRAM'} && defined $ENV{'TERM_PROGRAM'}) ? $ENV{'TERM_PROGRAM'} : '';
  my $term = (exists $ENV{'TERM'} && defined $ENV{'TERM'}) ? $ENV{'TERM'} : 'vt100';
  my $is_xterm = ($term =~ /xterm/);
  my $is_24bit = ($term_program =~ /MacTerm/);
  print "\033#3BEGIN DIFF\n";
  print "\033#4BEGIN DIFF\n\033#5";
  while (<>) {
    if (/^\+/ && !/^\+\+/) {
      if ($is_24bit) {
        print "\033[48:2:150:200:150m", "\033[2K", "\033[38:2::88:m", "\033[1m";
      } elsif ($is_xterm) {
        print "\033[48;5;149m", "\033[2K", "\033[38;5;235m", "\033[1m";
      } else {
        print "\033[42m", "\033[2K", "\033[30m", "\033[1m";
      }
    } elsif (/^\-/ && !/^\-\-/) {
      if ($is_24bit) {
        print "\033[48:2:244:150:150m", "\033[2K", "\033[38:2:144:0::m";
      } elsif ($is_xterm) {
        print "\033[48;5;52m", "\033[2K", "\033[38;5;124m";
      } else {
        print "\033[41m", "\033[2K", "\033[37m";
      }
    } else {
      print "\033[3m";
    }
    chomp;
    print;
    print "\033[0m\n";
  }
  print "\033#3END DIFF\n";
  print "\033#4END DIFF\n\033#5";

thristian10y ago

makecheck10y ago

jfountain201510y ago

Nice improvement to diff but I think I'll still use `git difftool` with Diffmerge https://sourcegear.com/diffmerge/

hobarrera10y ago

I didn't quite like this, put it does reference diff-hightlight, which is part of git-contrib (so it may already be installed on your system, but just not in your $PATH!):

https://github.com/git/git/tree/master/contrib/diff-highligh...

For example, here's a diff where it improved readability enormously:

https://i.imgur.com/8iQNaeu.png

hobarrera10y ago

Yes, the code in that sample is horrible triplicate. Please ignore that.

felipesabino10y ago

I have an alias for the diff params bellow, which has basically the same visual result, without the need to install anything.

  $ git diff --color --color-words --abbrev

_ZeD_10y ago

what are the advantages over colordiff[0]? (or a graphic differ like kdiff3[1])

[0] http://www.colordiff.org/ [1] http://kdiff3.sourceforge.net/

tremguy10y ago

> No pesky + or - at line-stars, making for easier copy-paste.

I wonder if easing copypasting is a good or bad thing..

mrinterweb10y ago

Vim's fugitive plugin also gives a similar split diff view. The command is "Gdiff".

ilikepi10y ago

Even without the plugin, you can spawn a diff in vim via git's difftool settings. Here's a basic version that can be used in one's .gitconfig:

    [diff]
      tool = customvim
    [difftool "customvim"]
      cmd = vim -R -f -d \"$LOCAL\" \"$REMOTE\"

stevemao10y ago

We've grown and it's out of control. diff-so-fancy moved to an org!!! https://github.com/so-fancy/diff-so-fancy

nikolay10y ago

I find icdiff [0] (Improved Colored Diff) better.

[0]: https://github.com/jeffkaufman

GreaterFool10y ago

Is there any language aware diff tool? I think I saw some commercial product for Java but other than that I haven't seen any attempts to do that.

samuell10y ago

When writing manuscripts in git, my favourite "trick" is git diff --word-diff (of course aliased to git wdiff).

module1710y ago

It looks so good and real, I kept hitting `q` whilst looking at the image.

nqzero10y ago

the netbeans.team.diff tool is similar (showing the specific words that changed), allows interactive editing, and does a good job even with large insertions and deletions

AdmiralAsshat10y ago

So what does this offer over simply using vimdiff?

merb10y ago

this doesn't look useful. the left one is just fine. for everything else you wouldn't need a cli diff tool...

nqzero10y ago

when one or 2 words change in a long or dense line, it's nice to have the specific changes highlighted

(i use netbeans diff, not this tool, but they appear similar)

djur10y ago

git has built-in word diffing with --word-diff, though. --word-diff=color does almost exactly the same thing.

1 more reply

Animats10y ago

Hurts. Hurts bad. Tiny type in many primary colors on a black background. 1985 called, it wants its screen layout back.

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