better-diffs-with-delta.md

Better Diffs With Delta

A git diff from the command line is relatively bare bones. It shows you removed lines and added lines that make up a changeset with the former text in red and the later text in green. All other contextual text is in white. I've found this to be good enough for most of the life of my git usage. I've been missing out though.

By using delta as the pager and diff filter for git, I get a bunch of nice visual improvements.

• Removals and additions are red and green shaded backgrounds
• Syntax highlighting for most languages
• Highlight specific part of a line that has changed
• Visual spacing and layout is clearer

To get all of this, all I had to do was install delta:

$ brew install delta

And then add delta as both the core pager and diffFilter in my global git config file:

[core]
	pager = delta
[interactive]
	singleKey = true # unrelated, but nice to have
	diffFilter = delta --color-only

It's also recommended that you use zdiff3 for your merge conflict style, which I already had:

[merge]
	conflictstyle = zdiff3

Once you have ths all configred, try a git diff or git add --patch and see how much more visual info you get.