Perl
Good-lookin' diffs. Actually… nah… The best-lookin' diffs. 🎉

diff-so-fancy

diff-so-fancy builds on the good-lookin' output of git contrib's diff-highlight to upgrade your diffs' appearances.

• Output will not be in standard patch format, but will be readable.
• No pesky + or - at line-start, making for easier copy-paste.

Screenshot

git diff vs git diff --color | diff-so-fancy

Usage

You can do one-off fanciness:

git diff --color | diff-so-fancy

But, you'll probably want to fancify all your diffs. Run this so git diff will use it:

git config --global core.pager "diff-so-fancy | less --tabs=4 -RFX"

However, if you'd prefer to do the fanciness on-demand with git dsf, drop an alias in your ~/.gitconfig:

dsf = "!f() { [ \"$GIT_PREFIX\" != \"\" ] && cd "$GIT_PREFIX"; git diff --color $@ | diff-so-fancy | less --tabs=4 -RFX; }; f"

Install

For convenience, the recommended installation is via NPM. If you'd prefer, you may choose to do a manual installation instead.

npm install -g diff-so-fancy

This will install and link the diff-so-fancy and diff-highlight scripts. You can also upgrade to the latest version with this command.

On Mac, you can install via Homebrew:

brew update
brew install diff-so-fancy

Improved colors for the highlighted bits

diff-highlight has default colors that are arguably a little nasty. They'll work fine, but you can try some fancier colors:

git config --global color.diff-highlight.oldNormal "red bold"
git config --global color.diff-highlight.oldHighlight "red bold 52"
git config --global color.diff-highlight.newNormal "green bold"
git config --global color.diff-highlight.newHighlight "green bold 22"

You may also want to configure general diff colors.

Manual install

If you want, you can choose to install manually:

1. Grab the two scripts (diff-highlight and diff-so-fancy) via either downloading or cloning the repo.
2. If you download diff-highlight from the official git repo, give it a chmod +x.
3. Place them in a location that is in your PATH directly or with symlinks.
4. Place lib/diff-so-fancy.pl in the same directory as diff-so-fancy. You will end up something like this:
   • ~/bin/diff-highlight
   • ~/bin/diff-so-fancy
   • ~/bin/lib/diff-so-fancy.pl
5. Set up the git core.pager config, as described above.

Note: The diff-highlight dependency is an official git-contrib script, duplicated here for convenience. If you prefer less fancy in your diff, you also use diff-highlight on it's own.

options

markEmptyLines

Should the first block of an empty line be colored.

changeHunkIndicators

Simplify git header chunks to a more human readable format.

stripLeadingSymbols

Should the pesky + or - at line-start be removed.

By default all the configs are true. You can turn any off by running:

git config --bool --global diff-so-fancy.markEmptyLines false
git config --bool --global diff-so-fancy.changeHunkIndicators false
git config --bool --global diff-so-fancy.stripLeadingSymbols false

To reset them to default (true):

git config --unset --global diff-so-fancy.markEmptyLines
git config --unset --global diff-so-fancy.changeHunkIndicators
git config --unset --global diff-so-fancy.stripLeadingSymbols

Pro-tips

Opting-out

Sometimes you will want to bypass diff-so-fancy. Use --no-pager for that:

git --no-pager diff

Moving around in the diff

You can pre-seed your less pager with a search pattern, so you can move between files with n/p keys. Add --pattern='^(added|deleted|modified): ' to the end of the less flags for your git pager config.

History

diff-so-fancy started as a commit in paulirish's dotfiles, which grew into a standalone script. Later, @stevemao brought it into its own repo (here), and gave it the room to mature. It's quickly grown into a widely collaborative project.

Contributing

Pull requests quite welcome, along with any feedback or ideas.

Reporting bugs

If you find a bug using the following command

git diff HEAD..HEAD^

You can use report-bug.sh we provide

./report-bug.sh 'git diff HEAD..HEAD^'

# or

curl https://raw.githubusercontent.com/so-fancy/diff-so-fancy/master/report-bug.sh | bash -s 'git diff HEAD..HEAD^' 'diff.txt'

Grab the output file and attach to the GitHub issue you create. A base64 version is also copied to your clipboard so you can paste to the issue.

Hacking

# fork and clone the diff-so-fancy repo.
git clone https://github.com/so-fancy/diff-so-fancy/ && cd diff-so-fancy

# test a saved diff against your local version
cat test/fixtures/ls-function.diff | ./diff-so-fancy

# setup symlinks to use local copy
npm link
cd ~/projects/catfabulator && git diff

Running tests

You'll need to install bats, the Bash automated testing system. It's also available as brew install bats

git submodule sync
git submodule update --init # pull in the assertion library, bats-assert

# Run the test suite once:
bats test

# Run it on every change with `entr`
brew install entr
ls --color=never diff-so-fancy test/*.bats | entr bats test

When writing assertions, you'll likely want to compare to expected output. To grab that reliably, you can use something like git --no-pager diff | diff-so-fancy > output.txt

You can lint your scripts via shellcheck, our CI bots will also check.

brew install shellcheck
shellcheck diff-so-fancy update-deps.sh

License

MIT