git - View differences of branches with meld?

Question

I know that I can view the difference between HEAD and current state with meld .. But how can I view the differences between branches, for example master and devel with meld?

At the moment I do the following steps:

1. Rename folder of working copy
   For example mv /projectA /projectA_master)
2. Clone the project again
   git clone url
3. Switch to devel branch
   cd projectA && git -b devel origin/devel
4. View differences with meld
   meld /projectA_Master projectA

Isn't there an easier way to get the same result in meld? I only need it to review the changes and not primarily for merging.

Answer 1

Short & sweet:

git config --global diff.tool meld

This configures Git to use meld as the diff tool. (You don't need to specify the command line arguments, support for meld is built into Git.)

Then, if you want a graphical diff instead of a textual one, you simply invoke git difftool instead of git diff (they both take the same arguments). In your case:

git difftool master..devel

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Update: If you don't want the one-file-at-a-time diff, but instead want to use meld's "subdirectory" view with all the changes between the two branches, note the -d or --dir-diff option for git difftool. For example, when I'm on branch XYZ and I want to see what is different between this and branch ABC, I run this:

git difftool -d ABC