When I type git diff, I'd like to see a side-by-side diff, like with diff -y, or like to display the diff in an interactive diff tool like kdiff3. How can this be done?

4

17 Answers

Try git difftool

Use git difftool instead of git diff. You'll never go back.

UPDATE to add an example usage:

Here is a link to another stackoverflow that talks about git difftool: How do I view 'git diff' output with my preferred diff tool/ viewer?

For newer versions of git, the difftool command supports many external diff tools out-of-the-box. For example vimdiff is auto supported and can be opened from the command line by:

cd /path/to/git/repo
git difftool --tool=vimdiff

Other supported external diff tools are listed via git difftool --tool-help here is an example output:

'git difftool --tool=<tool>' may be set to one of the following: araxis kompare vimdiff vimdiff2
The following tools are valid, but not currently available: bc3 codecompare deltawalker diffuse ecmerge emerge gvimdiff gvimdiff2 kdiff3 meld opendiff tkdiff xxdiff

6

Although Git has an internal implementation of diff, you can set up an external tool instead.

There are two different ways to specify an external diff tool:

1. setting the GIT_EXTERNAL_DIFF and the GIT_DIFF_OPTS environment variables.
2. configuring the external diff tool via git config

ymattw's answer is also pretty neat, using ydiff

See also:

• git diff --help

When doing a git diff, Git checks both the settings of above environment variables and its .gitconfig file.

By default, Git passes the following seven arguments to the diff program:

path old-file old-hex old-mode new-file new-hex new-mode

You typically only need the old-file and new-file parameters. Of course most diff tools only take two file names as an argument. This means that you need to write a small wrapper-script, which takes the arguments which Git provides to the script, and hands them on to the external git program of your choice.

Let's say you put your wrapper-script under ~/scripts/my_diff.sh:

#!/bin/bash
# un-comment one diff tool you'd like to use
# side-by-side diff with custom options:
# /usr/bin/sdiff -w200 -l "$2" "$5"
# using kdiff3 as the side-by-side diff:
# /usr/bin/kdiff3 "$2" "$5"
# using Meld
/usr/bin/meld "$2" "$5"
# using VIM
# /usr/bin/vim -d "$2" "$5"

you then need to make that script executable:

chmod a+x ~/scripts/my_diff.sh

you then need to tell Git how and where to find your custom diff wrapper script. You have three choices how to do that: (I prefer editing the .gitconfig file)

1. Using GIT_EXTERNAL_DIFF, GIT_DIFF_OPTS

   e.g. in your .bashrc or .bash_profile file you can set:

    GIT_EXTERNAL_DIFF=$HOME/scripts/my_diff.sh export GIT_EXTERNAL_DIFF

2. Using git config

   use "git config" to define where your wrapper script can be found:

    git config --global diff.external ~/scripts/my_diff.sh

3. Editing your ~/.gitconfig file

   you can edit your ~/.gitconfig file to add these lines:

    [diff] external = ~/scripts/my_diff.sh

Note:

Similarly to installing your custom diff tool, you can also install a custom merge-tool, which could be a visual merging tool to better help visualizing the merge. (see the progit.org page)

See: and

5

You can also try git diff --word-diff. It's not exactly side-by-side, but somehow better, so you might prefer it to your actual side-by-side need.

6

ydiff

Formerly called cdiff, this tool can display side by side, incremental, and colorful diff.

Instead of doing git diff, do:

ydiff -s -w0

This will launch ydiff in side-by-side display mode for each of the files with differences.

Install with:

python3 -m pip install --user ydiff

-or-

brew install ydiff

For git log, you can use:

ydiff -ls -w0

-w0 auto-detects your terminal width. See the ydiff GitHub repository page for detail and demo.

Tested in Git 2.18.0, ydiff 1.1.

3

You can do a side-by-side diff using sdiff as follows:

$ git difftool -y -x sdiff HEAD^ | less

where HEAD^ is an example that you should replace with whatever you want to diff against.

I found this solution here where there are a couple of other suggestions also. However, this one answer's the OP's question succinctly and clearly.

See the man git-difftool for an explanation of the arguments.

---

Taking the comments on board, you can create a handy git sdiff command by writing the following executable script:

#!/bin/sh
git difftool -y -x "sdiff -w $(tput cols)" "${@}" | less

Save it as /usr/bin/git-sdiff and chmod +x it. Then you'll be able to do this:

$ git sdiff HEAD^

Extra Tip

As suggested in comments you can use icdiff to do what sdiff does with colored output:

$ more /usr/bin/git-sdiff
#!/bin/sh
git difftool -y -x "icdiff --cols=$(tput cols)" "${@}" | less

0

For unix, combining just git and the built-in diff:

git show HEAD:path/to/file | diff -y - path/to/file

Of course, you can replace HEAD with any other git reference, and you probably want to add something like -W 170 to the diff command.

This assumes that you are just comparing your directory contents with a past commit. Comparing between two commits is more complex. If your shell is bash you can use "process substitution":

diff -y -W 170 <(git show REF1:path/to/file) <(git show REF2:path/to/file)

where REF1 and REF2 are git references – tags, branches or hashes.

1

export GIT_EXTERNAL_DIFF='meld $2 $5; echo >/dev/null'

then simply:

git diff

2

If you'd like to see side-by-side diffs in a browser without involving GitHub, you might enjoy git webdiff, a drop-in replacement for git diff:

$ pip install webdiff
$ git webdiff

This offers a number of advantages over traditional GUI difftools like tkdiff in that it can give you syntax highlighting and show image diffs.

Read more about it here.

I recently implemented a tool that does exactly this:

Here's how to use it:

npm install -g git-split-diffs
git config --global core.pager "git-split-diffs --color | less -RFX"

And this is how it looks in your terminal (with the default theme):

As you can see, it also supports syntax highlighting and highlighting changed words within lines

3

I use colordiff.

On Mac OS X, install it with

$ sudo port install colordiff

On Linux is possibly apt get install colordiff or something like that, depending on your distro.

Then:

$ git difftool --extcmd="colordiff -ydw" HEAD^ HEAD

Or create an alias

$ git alias diffy "difftool --extcmd=\"colordiff -ydw\""

Then you can use it

$ git diffy HEAD^ HEAD

I called it "diffy" because diff -y is the side-by-side diff in unix. Colordiff also adds colors, that are nicer. In the option -ydw, the y is for the side-by-side, the w is to ignore whitespaces, and the d is to produce the minimal diff (usually you get a better result as diff)

2

I personally really like icdiff !

If you're on Mac OS X with HomeBrew, just do brew install icdiff.

To get the file labels correctly, plus other cool features, I have in my ~/.gitconfig:

[pager] difftool = true
[diff] tool = icdiff
[difftool "icdiff"] cmd = icdiff --head=5000 --highlight --line-numbers -L \"$BASE\" -L \"$REMOTE\" \"$LOCAL\" \"$REMOTE\"

And I use it like: git difftool

This question showed up when I was searching for a fast way to use git builtin way to locate differences. My solution criteria:

• Fast startup, needed builtin options
• Can handle many formats easily, xml, different programming languages
• Quickly identify small code changes in big textfiles

I found this answer to get color in git.

To get side by side diff instead of line diff I tweaked mb14's excellent answer on this question with the following parameters:

$ git diff --word-diff-regex="[A-Za-z0-9. ]|[^[:space:]]"

If you do not like the extra [- or {+ the option --word-diff=color can be used.

$ git diff --word-diff-regex="[A-Za-z0-9. ]|[^[:space:]]" --word-diff=color

That helped to get proper comparison with both json and xml text and java code.

In summary the --word-diff-regex options has a helpful visibility together with color settings to get a colorized side by side source code experience compared to the standard line diff, when browsing through big files with small line changes.

0

Here's an approach. If you pipe through less, the xterm width is set to 80, which ain't so hot. But if you proceed the command with, e.g. COLS=210, you can utilize your expanded xterm.

gitdiff()
{ local width=${COLS:-$(tput cols)} GIT_EXTERNAL_DIFF="diff -yW$width \$2 \$5; echo >/dev/null" git diff "$@"
}

1

Open Intellij IDEA, select a single or multiple commits in the "Version Control" tool window, browse changed files, and double click them to inspect changes side by side for each file.

With the bundled command-line launcher you can bring IDEA up anywhere with a simple idea some/path

Several others already mentioned cdiff for git side-by-side diffing but no one gave a full implementation of it.

Setup cdiff:

git clone
cd cdiff
ln -s `pwd`/cdiff ~/bin/cdiff
hash -r # refresh your PATH executable in bash (or 'rehash' if you use tcsh) # or just create a new terminal

Edit ~/.gitconfig inserting these lines:

[pager] diff = false show = false
[diff] tool = cdiff external = "cdiff -s $2 $5 #"
[difftool "cdiff"] cmd = cdiff -s \"$LOCAL\" \"$REMOTE\"
[alias] showw = show --ext-dif

The pager off is needed for cdiff to work with Diff, it is essentially a pager anyway so this is fine. Difftool will work regardless of these settings.

The show alias is needed because git show only supports external diff tools via argument.

The '#' at the end of the diff external command is important. Git's diff command appends a $@ (all available diff variables) to the diff command, but we only want the two filenames. So we call out those two explicitly with $2 and $5, and then hide the $@ behind a comment which would otherwise confuse sdiff. Resulting in an error that looks like:

fatal: <FILENAME>: no such path in the working tree
Use 'git <command> -- <path>...' to specify paths that do not exist locally.

Git commands that now produce side-by-side diffing:

git diff <SHA1> <SHA2>
git difftool <SHA1> <SHA2>
git showw <SHA>

Cdiff usage:

'SPACEBAR' - Advances the page of the current file.
'Q' - Quits current file, thus advancing you to the next file.

You now have side-by-side diff via git diff and difftool. And you have the cdiff python source code for power user customization should you need it.

This may be a somewhat limited solution, but does the job using the system's diff command without external tools:

diff -y <(git show from-rev:the/file/path) <(git show to-rev:the/file/path)

• filter just the change lines use --suppress-common-lines (if your diff supports the option).
• no colors in this case, just the usual diff markers
• can tweak the column width --width=term-width; in Bash can get the width as $COLUMNS or tput cols.

This can be wrapped into a helper git-script too for more convenience, for example, usage like this:

git diffy the/file/path --from rev1 --to rev2

There are a lot of good answers on this thread. My solution for this issue was to write a script.

Name this 'git-scriptname' (and make it executable and put it in your PATH, like any script), and you can invoke it like a normal git command by running

$ git scriptname

The actual functionality is just the last line. Here's the source:

#!/usr/bin/env zsh
#
# Show a side-by-side diff of a particular file how it currently exists between:
# * the file system
# * in HEAD (latest committed changes)
function usage() { cat <<-HERE USAGE $(basename $1) <file> Show a side-by-side diff of a particular file between the current versions: * on the file system (latest edited changes) * in HEAD (latest committed changes)
HERE
}
if [[ $# = 0 ]]; then usage $0 exit
fi
file=$1
diff -y =(git show HEAD:$file) $file | pygmentize -g | less -R

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