diff-so-fancy

Oh, so fancy!

The project diff-so-fancy is a tool to make git diff more readable. Err… more fancy!

Install and usage is pretty easy. Just brew install diff-so-fancy to install and then you can configure git to use it. If you want to go all in, use the official method:

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

For me, I just enabled it for git diff and git show by adding the following to my .gitconfig file:

[pager]
	diff = diff-so-fancy | less --tabs=4 -RFX
	show = diff-so-fancy | less --tabs=4 -RFX

Also in the install, they recommend adding some colors to the git diff output. I already had a lot set, so mine ended up looking like this:

[color]
  pager = true
  ui = auto
  status = auto
  diff = auto
  branch = auto
  showBranch = auto
  interactive = auto
  grep = auto
[color "status"]
  header = black bold
  branch = cyan
  nobranch = red
  unmerged = red
  untracked = magenta
  added = green
  changed = yellow bold
[color "diff"]
  meta = magenta
  frag = black bold
  func = blue
  old = red strike
  new = green
  commit = cyan
  whitespace = red
  context = normal dim
[color "branch"]
  current = cyan
  local = blue
  remote = magenta
  upstream = magenta
  plain = normal
[color "decorate"]
  branch = green bold
  remoteBranch = magenta bold
  tag = magenta bold
  stash = cyan
  HEAD = cyan bold
[color "interactive"]
  prompt = red
  header = red bold
  error = red
  help = black bold
[color "grep"]
  context = normal
  match = green
  filename = blue
  function = blue
  selected = normal
  separator = cyan bold
  linenumber = yellow
[color "diff-highlight"]
  oldNormal = red
  oldHighlight = red 52
  newNormal = green
  newHighlight = green 22

And that’s it! Now you are fancy! One thing I worried about when I was setting this up is if diff-so-fancy would break things when I tried to save a diff to a file for a patch or somehow break other tools, like tig. But, no need to fear, the install method ensures diff-so-fancy only kicks in when you need to use the pager. So, when you are piping output to another command or sending it to a file, git already knows not to use the pager and thus, diff-so-fancy is not invoked.

Here is a demo with some silly edits:

What I particularly like about the above output is the highlighting of the changed words.

Lastly, I recommend checking out their pro tips for some extra fancy. I’m currently trying out the “Moving around in the diff” tip.

See also

• bat
• Kube Prompt