GIT Your Diff Pimped

GIT was recently updated to version 2.9 and GitHub posted a blog article about some of the changes here. The section about “Beautiful diffs” really got me excited and I decided to pimp my command line diff capabilities from what I had read. The following are the steps I took to change the boring old command line diff into a thing of beauty.

• Configure GIT to use the new experimental compactionheuristic feature.
• Install diff-so-fancy

Configure compactionHeuristic

This part was easy; open up GIT bash and run the following command:

git config --global --add diff.compactionHeuristic true

Done!

Install diff-so-fancy

You can find diff-so-fancy right here. There are a couple of ways to install this tool, but I already had Node.js installed and the npm route was just plain simple.

Run the following command to install diff-so-fancy via npm:

npm install -g diff-so-fancy

I configured the diff-highlight colors as suggested by diff-so-fancy using the following commands:

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"

Finally, I configured GIT to use diff-so-fancy as my pager so that every diff looks even better than the last!

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

Diff Everything

It’s pretty easy, but those few steps above made a huge difference in my command line diffing. I barely use my difftool anymore because these command line diffs are so gorgeous!

Checkout the difference those minor tweaks can make to your command line diff below:

First, here is a plain diff with no modifications:

Second, here is a diff with the compaction heuristic enabled:

Third, here is the same diff with compaction heuristic and diff-so-fancy installed:

Lastly, here is a bonus shot of diff-so-fancy where it is highlighting the exact characters on the line that changed; very fancy: