Hello guys,
To my surprise multiple people expressed their interest in
productivity-friendly diff highlighting. So let me write a brief
summary on this topic, after some investigation.
Mattia told me privately about the alternative of diff-so-fancy:
diff a b | colordiff | diff-highlight | less -R
where
* colordiff does the same thing as 'diff --color'. For older
Debian systems, diffutils doesn't support the '--color'.
Sid users don't need this package.
* diff-highlight is the script shipped in git package, quite easy to use
1. cd /usr/share/doc/git/contrib/diff-highlight/
2. sudo make
3. use the resulting executable as a filter:
git config --global core.pager "XXX/diff-highlight | less --tabs=4 -RFX"
Now let's look at diff-so-fancy. In fact the diff-highlight (denoted
as 'DH' below, not your favorite debhelper) shipped in the git package
is able to produce similar result compared to diff-so-fancy (denoted as 'DSF'
below), except for
* DH doesn't mangle standard notations of the patch format; while
DSF mangles them. See example below.
I started to doubt why git upstream doesn't enable such a
useful productivity feature by default? Who will be aware of
the existence of diff-highlight if he/she doesn't look into
the source tree?
======================= DH example
diff --git a/dotfile/gitconfig b/dotfile/gitconfig
index 90a5ee6f..7c7633e7 100644
--- a/dotfile/gitconfig
+++ b/dotfile/gitconfig
@@ -1,5 +1,5 @@
[core]
- pager = less
+ pager = diff-so-fancy | less --tabs=4 -RFX
editor = vim
quotepath = false
[pager]
======================= DSF example
──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
modified: dotfile/gitconfig
──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
@ dotfile/gitconfig:2 @
[core]
pager = less
pager = diff-so-fancy | less --tabs=4 -RFX
editor = vim
quotepath = false
[pager]
On Fri, Mar 22, 2019 at 05:16:07PM +0200, Peter Pentchev wrote:
> On Fri, Mar 22, 2019 at 05:06:10PM +0200, Peter Pentchev wrote:
> > On Fri, Mar 22, 2019 at 03:34:37PM +0100, Adam Borowski wrote:
> > [snip]
> > > Highlighting changes inside the line is a massive improvement.
> > >
> > > There's an implementation of this in "git" itself already, named
> > > diff-highlight. Alas, either I'm a complete idiot, or its documentation
> > > is
> > > not quite adequate -- some time ago I wasted over an hour trying to get
> > > that
> > > implementation to work, without success.
> >
> [snip shell snippets]
> >
> > You're welcome... and thanks for bringing diff-highlight to my attention so
> > that I could whip these up :) Now only to figure out how to get the colors
> > more similar to the ones that Vim uses (I use a ~/bin/vdiff script that
> > pipes stuff through `vim -c 'set ft=diff' -` and I really, really like its
> > colors)...
>
> Uh, well, please note that this is in no way meant to say that there is
> no need for this ITP; on the contrary, if there is an external, configurable
> tool that can be used for other stuff, too, please go ahead and package it!
>
> G'luck,
> Peter
>
> --
> Peter Pentchev roam@{ringlet.net,debian.org,FreeBSD.org} p...@storpool.com
> PGP key: http://people.FreeBSD.org/~roam/roam.key.asc
> Key fingerprint 2EE7 A7A5 17FC 124C F115 C354 651E EFB0 2527 DF13
