diff-so-fancy makes your diffs human readable instead of machine readable. This helps improve code quality and helps you spot defects faster.

Vanilla git diff vs git and diff-so-fancy

Simply copy the diff-so-fancy script from the latest Github release into your $PATH and you're done. Alternately to test development features you can clone this repo and then put the diff-so-fancy script (symlink will work) into your $PATH. The lib/ directory will need to be kept relative to the core script.

diff-so-fancy is also available from the NPM registry, brew, Fedora, in the Arch extra repo, and as ppa:aos for Debian/Ubuntu Linux.

Issues relating to packaging ("installation does not work", "version is out of date", etc.) should be directed to those packages' repositories/issue trackers where applicable.

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

git config --global core.pager "diff-so-fancy | less --tabs=4 -RF"
git config --global interactive.diffFilter "diff-so-fancy --patch"

Use -u with diff for unified output, and pipe the output to diff-so-fancy:

diff -u file_a file_b | diff-so-fancy

We also support recursive mode with -r or --recursive

diff --recursive -u /path/folder_a /path/folder_b | diff-so-fancy

Colorize the first block of an empty line. (Default: true)

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

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

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

Should the + or - symbols 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

By default, the separator for the file header spans the full width of the terminal. Use rulerWidth to set the width of the file header manually.

git config --global diff-so-fancy.rulerWidth 80

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 fancier.

• Pro-tips for advanced users
• Reporting Bugs
• Hacking and Testing
• History

• Delta
• Lazygit with diff-so-fancy integration

MIT