How to colorize diff on the command line?

unix command-line colors diff
daniel kullmann picture daniel kullmann · Jan 10, 2012 · Viewed 184.5k times · Source

When I have a diff, how can I colorize it so that it looks good? I want it for the command line, so please no GUI solutions.

Answer

kaji picture kaji · Jan 10, 2012

Man pages for diff suggest no solution for colorization from within itself. Please consider using colordiff. It's a wrapper around diff that produces the same output as diff, except that it augments the output using colored syntax highlighting to increase readability:

diff old new | colordiff

or just:

colordiff old new

Installation:

  • Ubuntu/Debian: sudo apt-get install colordiff
  • OS X: brew install colordiff or port install colordiff

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