diff-so-fancy strives to make your diffs human readable instead of machine readable. This helps improve code quality and helps you spot defects faster.

Vanilla git diff vs git and diff-so-fancy

Simply copy the diff-so-fancy script from the latest release into your $PATH and you're done. Alternately to test development features you can clone this repo and then put the diff-so-fancy script (symlink will work) into your $PATH. The lib/ directory will need to be kept relative to the core script.

diff-so-fancy is also available from the NPM registry, brew, Fedora, in the Arch extra repo, and as ppa:aos for Debian/Ubuntu Linux.

Issues relating to packaging ("installation does not work", "version is out of date", etc.) should be directed to those packages' repositories/issue trackers where applicable.

Configure git to use diff-so-fancy for all diff output:

git config --global core.pager "diff-so-fancy | less --tabs=4 -RF"
git config --global interactive.diffFilter "diff-so-fancy --patch"

Use -u with diff for unified output, and pipe the output to diff-so-fancy:

diff -u file_a file_b | diff-so-fancy

It also supports the recursive mode of diff with -r or --recursive as first argument

diff -r -u folder_a folder_b | diff-so-fancy

diff --recursive -u folder_a folder_b | diff-so-fancy

Should the first block of an empty line be colored. (Default: true)

git config --bool --global diff-so-fancy.markEmptyLines false

Simplify git header chunks to a more human readable format. (Default: true)

git config --bool --global diff-so-fancy.changeHunkIndicators false

Should the pesky + or - at line-start be removed. (Default: true)

git config --bool --global diff-so-fancy.stripLeadingSymbols false

By default, the separator for the file header uses Unicode line-drawing characters. If this is causing output errors on your terminal, set this to false to use ASCII characters instead. (Default: true)

git config --bool --global diff-so-fancy.useUnicodeRuler false

By default, the separator for the file header spans the full width of the terminal. Use this setting to set the width of the file header manually.

git config --global diff-so-fancy.rulerWidth 80

Pull requests are quite welcome, and should target the next branch. We are also looking for any feedback or ideas on how to make diff-so-fancy even fancier.

• Pro-tips on advanced usage
• Reporting Bugs
• Hacking and Testing
• History

• Delta
• Lazygit with diff-so-fancy integration

MIT