How to colorize diff on the command line

Man pages for diff suggest no solution for colorization from within itself. Please consider using colordiff. It's a wrapper around diff that produces the same output as diff, except that it augments the output using colored syntax highlighting to increase readability:

diff old new | colordiff

or just:

colordiff old new

Installation:

• Ubuntu/Debian: sudo apt-get install colordiff
• OS X: brew install colordiff or port install colordiff

Use Vim:

diff /path/to/a /path/to/b | vim -R -

Or better still, VimDiff (or vim -d, which is shorter to type) will show differences between two, three or four files side-by-side.

Examples:

vim -d /path/to/[ab]

vimdiff file1 file2 file3 file4

Actually there seems to be yet another option (which I only noticed recently, when running into the problem described above):

git diff --no-index <file1> <file2># output to console instead of opening a pagergit --no-pager diff --no-index <file1> <file2>

If you have Git around (which you already might be using anyway), then you will be able to use it for comparison, even if the files themselves are not under version control. If not enabled for you by default, then enabling color support here seems to be considerably easier than some of the previously mentioned workarounds.