diff-so-fancy VS delta

The diff itself is impressive, but in terms of styling I still prefer diff-so-fancy[1]. It's easier to read at a glance.

[1]: https://github.com/so-fancy/diff-so-fancy/

I don't have much hope for this being improved anytime soon in diff-so-fancy given this issue, so I'm wondering if there's something else I can use in Terminal that would allow me to have an experience like GitLab. If that's not possible and I have to rely on a desktop application, that would be acceptable too.

This is actually one that's really easy to write and remember but I hate typing and I run it all the time, so I've aliased it down to gd for git-diff. Also I use diff-so-fancy to make the output of my diffs look frickin sweet and I suggest you do the same.

I recommend a tool like diff-so-fancy with some custom colors. You will never want to go back to vanilla diffs.

I just discovered diff-so-fancy, and very nice it is too. I immediately added it to my standard git config, which is semi-automatically installed on every machine I use. However, I've not (yet) installed diff-so-fancy on all the machines I use, and for those platforms for which it's not packaged I probably won't bother installing it from source.

I recently switched to diff-so-fancy for use in the terminal with the following configuration:

As the primary author of diff-so-fancy, which is entirely Perl, I fully support this endeavor.

Instead of delta https://github.com/dandavison/delta (shown in the previous video), I've also used diff-so-fancy https://github.com/so-fancy/diff-so-fancy and I've heard difftastic is good as well https://github.com/Wilfred/difftastic Do you use one of those or something else?

diff-so-fancy - syntax highlighting for diffs, including highlighting just the part of the line that changed: diff -ru ... | diff-so-fancy | less -R

Thanks for the difftastic & zoxide tips.

However, I've been using this git pager/difftool: https://github.com/dandavison/delta

While it's not structural like difft, it does produce more readable output for me (at least when scrolling fast through git log -p /scanning quickly

View on GitHub

I'm currently waiting on the integration between Delta and Difftastic:

https://github.com/dandavison/delta/issues/535

Difftastic now has JSON output, whic should make it much easier to build this.

I'm surely in the minority here. I've been using Emacs for almost a decade now, but I just can't get into the Magit workflow. I've tried several times, but always end up going back to Git on the command line. I have dozens of aliases, shell integrations, a nice diff viewer[1], etc., and interacting with Git has become muscle memory. I can commit, cherry-pick, rebase, bisect, fix conflicts, etc., in a fraction of the time it would take me to navigate Magit's UI. I'm sure with enough practice, a Magit user could do this more quickly and efficiently, but honestly, with some custom-built porcelain, Git's UI is not so bad. Though this could very well be Stockholm syndrome after using it for such a long time...

For whatever reason, Magit's opinionated workflows never clicked with me. A part of it is the concern that it will do something weird to my repo that I'll then have to waste more time undoing manually. I usually don't trust sugary wrappers around tools. And another is the fact I don't use Emacs on all machines, and setting up Git on a remote system is just a matter of copying over my config and some shell integrations.

Also, on a more personal note, I find the cultish fanboyism whenever Magit is brought up slightly offputting. Does anyone have anything bad to say about it? No software can realistically be this infallible. :)

[1]: https://github.com/dandavison/delta

For looking at diffs I still prefer the command line though, and use delta to view diffs between commits or branches.