diff-so-fancy

🎩 diff-so-fancy

diff-so-fancy makes your diffs human readable instead of machine readable. This helps improve code quality and helps you spot defects faster.

🖼️ Screenshot

Vanilla git diff vs git and diff-so-fancy

📦 Install

Simply copy the diff-so-fancy script from the latest Github release into your $PATH and you're done. Alternately to test development features you can clone this repo and then put the diff-so-fancy script (symlink will work) into your $PATH. The lib/ directory will need to be kept relative to the core script.

diff-so-fancy is also available from the NPM registry, brew, Fedora, in the Arch extra repo, and as ppa:aos for Debian/Ubuntu Linux.

Issues relating to packaging ("installation does not work", "version is out of date", etc.) should be directed to those packages' repositories/issue trackers where applicable.

✨ Usage

Git

Configure git to use diff-so-fancy for all diff output:

git config --global core.pager "diff-so-fancy | less --tabs=4 -RF"
git config --global interactive.diffFilter "diff-so-fancy --patch"

Diff

Use -u with diff for unified output, and pipe the output to diff-so-fancy:

diff -u file_a file_b | diff-so-fancy

We also support recursive mode with -r or --recursive

diff --recursive -u /path/folder_a /path/folder_b | diff-so-fancy

⚒️ Options

markEmptyLines

Colorize the first block of an empty line. (Default: true)

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

changeHunkIndicators

Simplify Git header chunks to a human readable format. (Default: true)

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

stripLeadingSymbols

Remove the + or - symbols at start of each diff line. (Default: true)

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

useUnicodeRuler

Use Unicode to draw the ruler lines. Setting this to false will use ASCII instead. (Default: true)

git config --bool --global diff-so-fancy.useUnicodeRuler false

rulerWidth

rulerWidth sets the width of the ruler lines. (Default: screen width)

git config --global diff-so-fancy.rulerWidth 80

shortHeaders

Simplify the header inforation to a single line for filename and line number. (Default false)

git config --global diff-so-fancy.shortHeaders true

👨 The diff-so-fancy team

🧬 Contributing

Pull requests are quite welcome, and should target the next branch. We are also looking for any feedback or ideas on how to make diff-so-fancy even fancier.

Other documentation

• Pro-tips for advanced users
• Reporting Bugs
• Hacking and Testing
• History

🔃 Alternatives

• Delta
• Lazygit with diff-so-fancy integration
• difftastic

🏛️ License

MIT