Git diff output to file preserve coloring

Question

Is it possible to do git diff and save the output to a file with the coloring somehow?

I know how to do git diff > filename.rtf - which saves to a file, but I'd like to preserve the coloring.

You can convert to html with color: stackoverflow.com/questions/2013091/coloured-diff-to-html — Gabe Moothart
– Gabe Moothart, Commented Mar 14, 2012 at 17:31
Notepad++ will highlight the file if you save it with the .diff extension. — Monsignor
– Monsignor, Commented Nov 5, 2014 at 12:33

Alex Martian · Accepted Answer · 2023-10-08 04:38:36Z

Try:

git diff --color > foo.txt

Then later issue:

cat foo.txt

Or:

less -R foo.txt

https://git-scm.com/book/en/v2/Customizing-Git-Git-Configuration:

Git automatically colors most of its output, but there’s a master switch if you don’t like this behavior. To turn off all Git’s colored terminal output, do this:

$ git config --global color.ui false

The default setting is auto, which colors output when it’s going straight to a terminal, but omits the color-control codes when the output is redirected to a pipe or a file.

You can also set it to always to ignore the difference between terminals and pipes. You’ll rarely want this; in most scenarios, if you want color codes in your redirected output, you can instead pass a --color flag to the Git command to force it to use color codes. The default setting is almost always what you’ll want.

@RoR, one person's "gibberish" is another person's (well, terminal's) color codes. ;-) I tried it and it works; the coloring is preserved if I cat the file from the command-line. (How else would you expect the colors to be preserved?)
Well that's what it does. Adds bash coloring codes. If you cat the file in the console it shows the colors.
@RoR You'd have to put something in the middle there to convert the bash color codes to rtf format.
Notepad++ can highlight diff files. (*.diff extensions are automatically highlighted, otherwise change Language --> D --> Diff.) If you don't like default colors, change them in Settings --> Style Configurator --> Diff. To copy paste with colors you can use a plugin (e.g. NppExport) that allows exporting/copying into RTF or HTML.
git diff A B > foo.diff (Many editors will open the file with the colors because the file is a .diff file)

ironhyde · Accepted Answer · 2018-01-29 23:20:07Z

90

Save the file with a .diff extension and open it in Notepad++ or Vim or SublimeText.

git diff > 20150203_someChanges.diff

Thanks @Monsingor

edited Jan 29, 2018 at 23:20

answered Feb 3, 2015 at 19:46

ironhyde

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1 Comment

Ali BENALI Over a year ago

the best answer I found so far it works also with VS Code

Peter Mortensen · Accepted Answer · 2019-08-05 22:27:56Z

23

Open the output diff file in Sublime Text 2. It shows the diff colors.

edited Aug 5, 2019 at 22:27

Peter Mortensen

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answered Aug 6, 2013 at 21:52

Julien

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2 Comments

Nikita R. Over a year ago

You might need to change syntax to diff to enable proper highlighting in case the diff file has extension different from *.diff. (via View -> Syntax -> Diff).

Nakilon Over a year ago

It doesn't highlight diff.txt for me, even with automatically detected "Diff" in the right bottom corner.

Nakilon · Accepted Answer · 2016-09-20 20:30:07Z

20

To expand on @Gabe's answer.

You can pipe the output to an ansi to html converter bash script and direct that output to an html file:

git diff --color|./ansi2html.sh > changes.html

of course html can be viewed by any browser so output can be read in Windows etc.

ansi2html code is here: http://www.pixelbeat.org/scripts/ansi2html.sh

edited Sep 20, 2016 at 20:30

Nakilon

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answered May 5, 2014 at 20:37

sk8asd123

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5 Comments

Tim Over a year ago

doesn't work I get: gawk: cmd. line:25: (FILENAME=- FNR=1) fatal: attempt to use array `a (from span)' in a scalar context

Geoffrey Booth Over a year ago

Get Homebrew and run brew install gawk. You'll also need brew install gnu-sed.

Keith Over a year ago

exactly what i want, awesome !

Nagasaki45 Over a year ago

The ansi2html python library did it for me github.com/ralphbean/ansi2html. pip installable and works exactly as the bash script in this answer. Don't forget to replace "./ansi2html.sh" with "ansi2html".

Olivier Cailloux Over a year ago

In Debian-like, install kbtin and type git diff --word-diff --color commit1 commit2 | ansi2html > changes.html.

Rose Perrone · Accepted Answer · 2013-03-24 21:24:11Z

8

Vim colors files containing git diff's beautifully.

git diff

answered Mar 24, 2013 at 21:24

Rose Perrone

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Comments

Community · Accepted Answer · 2017-05-23 11:54:47Z

I found an answer here: Color output of specific git command.

You can pass -c color.ui=always to any git command and it will keep coloring on redirection. For example: git -c color.ui=always status > file

John Scott Stensland · Accepted Answer · 2018-01-13 16:46:32Z

to allow any colorized terminal text ... git diff or any other ... to be viewable from a browser

sudo apt-get install aha # https://github.com/theZiz/aha

install aha using above then issue

git diff --color mysourcefile | aha > ~/cool_colorized.html firefox ~/cool_colorized.html

VonC · Accepted Answer · 2022-07-12 07:53:53Z

As an alternative to file redirection, you also have the git diff --output option

git diff --color --output=aFile cat aFile # you would still see the colors

However, make sure to not use the combined diff format (for diff on merge commits), like git diff -c or git diff --cc

With Git 2.38 (Q3 2022), certain diff options (including --output) are currently ignored when combined-diff is shown; mark them as incompatible with the feature.

See commit cfb19ae, commit e3d1be4 (18 Jun 2022) by René Scharfe (rscharfe).
^{(Merged by Junio C Hamano -- gitster -- in commit a2d1f00, 11 Jul 2022)}

combine-diff: abort if --output is given

^{Reported-by: Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason}
^{Signed-off-by: René Scharfe}

The code for combined diffs currently only writes to stdout.
Abort and report that fact instead of silently ignoring the --output option.
The (empty) output file has already been created at that point, though.

The error message would therefore be:

combined diff and '--output' cannot be used together

Abhijeet · Accepted Answer · 2016-08-15 11:04:22Z

git remote add -f b path/to/repo_b.git git remote update git diff master remotes/b/master > foo.txt

Differences extracted in '*.txt' files are easily read by SublimeText2 without the need to set (via View -> Syntax -> Diff).

git remote rm remotes/b/master to reset branch back to it's original state.

Choylton B. Higginbottom · Accepted Answer · 2017-08-28 16:41:25Z

0

You could upload to GitHub and provide a link to the relevant commit.

answered Aug 28, 2017 at 16:41

Choylton B. Higginbottom

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