How can I visualize per-character differences in a unified diff file?
Here are some versions with less noisy output than git diff --word-diff-regex=<re>
and that require less typing than, but are equivalent to, git diff --color-words --word-diff-regex=<re>
.
Simple (does highlight space changes):
git diff --color-words
Simple (highlights individual character changes; does not highlight space changes):
git diff --color-words=.
More complex (does highlight space changes):
git diff --color-words='[^[:space:]]|([[:alnum:]]|UTF_8_GUARD)+'
In general:
git diff --color-words=<re>
where <re>
is a regexp defining "words" for the purpose of identifying changes.
These are less noisy in that they color the changed "words", whereas using just --word-diff-regex=<re>
surrounds matched "words" with colored -/+
markers.
git diff --color-words="[^[:space:]]|([[:alnum:]]|UTF_8_GUARD)+"
The above regex (from Thomas Rast) does a decent job of separating diff fragments at the punctuation/character level (while not being as noisy as --word-diff-regex=.
).
I posted a screenshot of the resulting output here.
Update:
This article has some great suggestions. Specifically, the contrib/
tree of the git repo has a diff-highlight
perl script that shows fine-grained highlights.
Quick start to use it:
$ curl https://git.kernel.org/cgit/git/git.git/plain/contrib/diff-highlight/diff-highlight > diff-highlight$ chmod u+x diff-highlight$ git diff --color=always HEAD~10 | diff-highlight | less -R