diff-so-fancy strives to make your diff's human readable instead of machine readable. This helps improve code quality and help you spot defects faster.

Vanilla git diff vs git and diff-so-fancy

Installation is as simple as downloading the diff-so-fancy script to a directory in your path. Windows users may need to install the Windows subsystem for Linux.

diff-so-fancy is also available from NPM, Nix, brew, and as a package on Arch Linux.

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

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

The default Git colors are not optimal. We suggest the following colors instead.

git config --global color.ui true

git config --global color.diff-highlight.oldNormal    "red bold"
git config --global color.diff-highlight.oldHighlight "red bold 52"
git config --global color.diff-highlight.newNormal    "green bold"
git config --global color.diff-highlight.newHighlight "green bold 22"

git config --global color.diff.meta       "yellow"
git config --global color.diff.frag       "magenta bold"
git config --global color.diff.commit     "yellow bold"
git config --global color.diff.old        "red bold"
git config --global color.diff.new        "green bold"
git config --global color.diff.whitespace "red reverse"

Should the first block of an empty line be colored. (Default: true)

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

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

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

Should the pesky + or - at line-start be removed. (Default: true)

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

By default the separator for the file header uses Unicode line drawing characters. If this is causing output errors on your terminal set this to false to use ASCII characters instead. (Default: true)

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

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 better.

• Pro-tips on advanced usage
• Reporting Bugs
• Hacking and Testing
• History

MIT