Admittedly, this diff output is hard to read. I swear, though, you do get used to it. I use it all the time.
That said, it can be nicer to see something more visual, you know, like the old version on the left and the new version on the right in a way that’s visually easier to comprehend.
If you’re using VS Code or some other IDEs, you get some nice diffing for free and don’t necessarily need to pay attention to this section. See more in the VS Code chapter.
First, the bad news is that Git doesn’t support this out of the box.
The good news is that there are a lot of third-party tools that do, and you can easily hook them up so that they work with Git super easily.
How easy?
Once you set it up, you’ll be able to just write difftool instead of diff on the command line. For example:
$ git difftool HEAD~3^!And what does that get you? For me, where I use Vim and have Vimdiff set up as my difftool, it gives me a screen like in Figure 28.1.
This might be a little tough to see in black and white, but what we have is the old version on the left and the new version on the right. The lines of minus signs on the left indicate lines that don’t exist in the old version, and we can see highlighted lines on the right that exist in the new version.
But if you just try to run git difftool out of the box, it won’t work. You have to configure it first.
Firstly, Git normally prompts you before launching a third-party difftool. This is annoying, so let’s turn it off globally:
$ git config --global difftool.prompt falseSecondly, we need to tell it which tool to use.
$ git config --global diff.tool vimdiffAnd that might be enough. If vimdiff (or whichever diff tool you’re using) is in your PATH39, you should be in business and you’re good to go.
If it’s not in your PATH, maybe because you installed it locally in your home directory tree somewhere, you can either add it to your PATH (search the Net for how to do this), or you can specify the full path to your particular difftool. Here’s an example with vimdiff, which is redundant for me because /usr/bin is already in my PATH.
$ git config --global difftool.vimdiff.path /usr/bin/vimdiffIf you’re using a different difftool other than vimdiff, replace that part of the config line with the name of the command.
Again, you only have to set the path if the tool isn’t installed in a standard place.
There are a number of diff tools out there you can choose from. Here’s a partial list, with the caveat that I’ve only ever used Vimdiff.
Some of these are free, some are paid, and some are free trial.
And remember, VS Code has this functionality without using difftool.