highlight - How to improve git's diff highlighting?

Question

The output of git diff is optimized for code which tends to be one statement per line whereas text can (if authors like me are too lazy to use line breaks) cause diff output which is very hard to read and more of a "Where's Wally?" search than reading diff output

whereas highlighting as done on GitLab's or GitHub's web frontend shows the difference immediately

I'm aware that I'm comparing HTML and plain text (apples and oranges), however it should be possible to improve the git diff output by using different colors or adding marker characters around a change (JUnit uses [] around insertions which isn't great to read, but an example for what I mean) and it would be the first time that there's something I expect to be somewhere available in git that actually was not.

Answer 1

The word-diff suggested in the other answer isn't exactly what gitlab/github do. To get same effect, you can use diff-highlight script that is distributed with git.

1. First find path to diff-highlight script. It varies between systems, and is not usually in $PATH. You can find it with your package manager, for example:

   1. Fedora: rpm -ql git | grep diff-highlight
   2. Debian/Ubuntu/Mint: dpkg -L git | grep diff-highlight
   3. Archlinux: pacman -Ql git | grep diff-highlight

2. Edit ~/.gitconfig, and add to the [pager] section the following (substitute the path):

   [pager]
       # diff-highlight is script provided by git that shows word-by-word diff
       log  = perl /usr/share/git/diff-highlight/diff-highlight | less
       show = perl /usr/share/git/diff-highlight/diff-highlight | less
       diff = perl /usr/share/git/diff-highlight/diff-highlight | less
   

   I'm using perl here instead of calling the script directly because some distros, it seems, do not set executable bit on the script. IMO this is a package bug which should be reported. Anyway, this answer should work disregarding that.

Now log, diff, show commands should show difference word-by-word. Screenshot: