I thought delta was fairly well-known by now so I was surprised to see this project not mention it (the readme already has a section for that). I wonder what they've chosen to do differently, besides write it in Node.js.
An that's cool. I've always had a dream of having the same syntax highlighting set up everywhere: vscode, bat, vim, git diff... etc.
I wish it was able to automatically switch from side-by-side to vertical diffs depending on my terminal widt, or at least override it with --side-by-side.
Edit: https://github.com/dandavison/delta/issues/493#issuecomment-...
The I like this over fancy CLI diff viewers for a handful of reasons:
- It re-uses my editor config (no need to fuss with that tools ad hoc config format)
- I can navigate the diff with my editor’s navigation tools (expand or hide context lines, open/close/reorganize tabs, etc.)
- My editor’s language-aware tooling kicks in. I can jump to def, reveal types, and find all references while reading the diffs.
I wrote more about some of the specific workflows I use in this post, if you’re curious to level up from a CLI-only diff workflow:
https://blog.jez.io/cli-code-review/
There’s a time and a place for CLI-only diff viewers, and kudos to the author for building a tool they enjoy! I’ve just found that they fit into a sort of uncanny valley of simplicity and power for my needs.
Have you (or anyone reading this) been able to figure out how to get diff-highlight to be more intelligent so that if 'foo' changes to "foo", the highlighter is smart enough to only highlight the quotes as changing, but not the word foo? (Though this example is trivial, any time you've got two changes on the same line, this issue occurs where everything in between those changes gets highlighted as well.) I noticed that other tools in this thread such as delta and banga don't suffer from this issue.
To highlight only the quotes as changing, you need something else. On (Neo)Vim, for example, vim-gitgutter does this [2] (I'm the author).
[1] https://github.com/git/git/tree/master/contrib/diff-highligh... [2] https://github.com/airblade/vim-gitgutter/blob/master/autolo...
What works for me is tig for git diffs.
Also very impressive is kitty-diff. If you use kitty as your OpenGL enabled terminal https://sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty/kittens/diff.html
in your .gitconfig
[diff]
tool = icdiff
[difftool]
prompt = false
[difftool "icdiff"]
cmd = /usr/bin/icdiff --line-numbers $LOCAL $REMOTE | less -eFXR
Good point about the themes, I'll add one. I'm hoping to make it easy to customize individual theme colors so you could unset the background colors, for example
And vimdiff is even an editor not just a viewer.
Now if it was say, Meld in a terminal, that would be worth talking about and I installing some stack as a dependency.
For this, I would look into Deno, which supports self contained binaries with typescript. I've never tried it myself so not sure how much work this would be.
I wrote a small script that tracks changes to your kubernetes cluster and sends a diff of the yaml to Slack. It works but I want to prettify the diff with a GitHub style diff and I need it in image format to send to slack.
It can be easily set up...