A better git diff

2020-11-17 - Louis-Philippe Véronneau

A few days ago I wrote a quick patch and missed a dumb mistake that made the program crash. When reviewing the merge request on Salsa, the problem became immediately apparent; Gitlab's diff is much better than what git diff shows by default in a terminal.

Well, it turns out since version 2.9, git bundles a better pager, diff-highlight. À la Gitlab, it will highlight what changed in the line.

The output of git diff using diff-highlight

Sadly, even though diff-highlight comes with the git package in Debian, it is not built by default (925288). You will need to:

$ sudo make --directory /usr/share/doc/git/contrib/diff-highlight

You can then add this line to your .gitconfig file:

[core]
  pager = /usr/share/doc/git/contrib/diff-highlight/diff-highlight | less --tabs=4 -RFX

If you use tig, you'll also need to add this line in your tigrc:

set diff-highlight = /usr/share/doc/git/contrib/diff-highlight/diff-highlight

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