How can I get output like in git diff --color-words, but outside Git?
Closest thing is wdiff -t, but it underlines/inverts things instead of using green/red colours and does not allow specifying my whitespace regex.
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5 Answers
git diff --color-words --no-index old.txt new.txt 
4 Comments
Cascabel
From the manpage: "If exactly two paths are given and at least one points outside the current repository, git diff will compare the two files / directories. This behavior can be forced by --no-index." (A lot of times you don't even need
--no-index.)
PhML
At least in my git 1.9.3, the order should be
git diff --no-index --color-words
Vi.
In my git v1.9.3 order of
--no-index and --color-words does not matter... (Actually I can't find a case now where it fails without --no-index at all).
Penghe Geng
Works great. Maybe we can add an alias
alias diff="git diff --no-index"?According to a comment from Jefromi you can just use
git diff --color-words file1 file2 outside of git repositories too.
3 Comments
Manu Manjunath
git diff didn't work on two arbit files as mentioned above. (git version 1.7.4). Although,
git diff --color-words --no-index <file1> <file2> works, correct approach would be to use wdiff, which is intended for that purpose (gnu.org/software/wdiff)
Zenexer
@Manu No,
git diff is intended for this purpose. wdiff is just a hack. Read your link sometime.
Joshua Goldberg
git diff is excellent, but the wdiff page noted above does not say that it's a hack. wdiff "is quite mature" according to its own documentation linked from that page: gnu.org/software/wdiff/manual/wdiff.htmlIf I'm inside a git repository (git v2.3.3) :
git diff --color-wordsdoesn't work (no output)git diff --no-indexdoesn't accept--color-wordsnor--colorarguments
Using wdiff is possible, configured to use colors, rather than underlined :
wdiff -n \ -w $'\033[30;31m' -x $'\033[0m' \ -y $'\033[30;32m' -z $'\033[0m' \ … | less -R Source : https://www.gnu.org/software/wdiff/manual/html_node/wdiff-Examples.html (modified to use foreground colors rather than background colors)
Hope it helps.
1 Comment
Vi.
Why
git --no-index --color-words fails? I used it (with earlier Git versions although).Git version 1.9.1:
git diff --word-diff=color fileA fileB
Comments
you can say git diff --color=always --color-words, which will give you the color escape codes in the output. you are going to have some shell to interpret the color codes though …
2 Comments
Vi.
The question was about using it outside Git repository. Also it misses some things when
--color-words=always instead of just --color-words.
knittl
@vi: sorry, you only said »outside git«, it did not mention a repository anywhere. i thought it was about having the color in other applications beside git (when e.g. piped) – which is also »outside git«, in the sense of »not inside the default git toolchain/tool collection«