Highlight changed lines and changed bytes in each changed line

git vim diff highlight word-diff
Nikolay Frantsev picture Nikolay Frantsev · Mar 16, 2011 · Viewed 20.3k times · Source

Open Source project Trac has an excellent diff highlighter — it highlights changed lines and changed bytes in each changed line! See here or here for examples.

Is there way to use the same color highlight (i.e. changed lines and changed bytes too) in bash terminal, git, or vim for diff output (patch-file)?

Answer

Sina Samavati picture Sina Samavati · Mar 1, 2013

The diff-highlight Perl contrib script produces output so similar to that of the Trac screenshots that it is likely that Trac is using it:

enter image description here

Install with:

wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/git/git/fd99e2bda0ca6a361ef03c04d6d7fdc7a9c40b78/contrib/diff-highlight/diff-highlight && chmod +x diff-highlight

Move the file diff-highlight to the ~/bin/ directory (or wherever your $PATH is), and then add the following to your ~/.gitconfig:

[pager]
        diff = diff-highlight | less
        log = diff-highlight | less
        show = diff-highlight | less

Single copy paste install suggested by @cirosantilli:

cd ~/bin
curl -O https://raw.githubusercontent.com/git/git/fd99e2bda0ca6a361ef03c04d6d7fdc7a9c40b78/contrib/diff-highlight/diff-highlight
chmod +x diff-highlight
git config --global pager.log 'diff-highlight | less'
git config --global pager.show 'diff-highlight | less'
git config --global pager.diff 'diff-highlight | less'
git config --global interactive.diffFilter diff-highlight

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