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
, add an alias to your ~/.gitconfig
by running:
git config --global alias.dsf '!f() { [ -z "$GIT_PREFIX" ] || cd "$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:
- Grab the two scripts (
diff-highlight
anddiff-so-fancy
) via either downloading or cloning the repo. - If you download
diff-highlight
from the official git repo, give it achmod +x
. - Place them in a location that is in your
PATH
directly or with symlinks. - Place
lib/diff-so-fancy.pl
in the same directory asdiff-so-fancy
. You will end up something like this:~/bin/diff-highlight
~/bin/diff-so-fancy
~/bin/lib/diff-so-fancy.pl
- 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='^(Date|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