How to colorize diff on the command line

Question

When I have a diff  how can I colorize it so that it looks good  I want it for the command line  so please no GUI solutions

User · Answer

diff --color option was added to GNU diffutils 3 4  2016-08-08  This is the default diff implementation on most distros  which will soon be getting it  Ubuntu 18 04 has diffutils 3 6 and therefore has it  On 3 5 it looks like this   Tested with  diff --color -u      lt  seq 6   sed  s    a         lt  seq 8   grep -Ev    2 3      sed  s    a     Apparently added in commit c0fa19fe92da71404f809aafb5f51cfd99b1bee2  Mar 2015   Word-level diff Like diff-highlight  Not possible it seems  feature request  https   lists gnu org archive html diffutils-devel 2017-01 msg00001 html Related threads   Using   39 diff  39   or anything else  to get character-level diff between text files https   unix stackexchange com questions 11128 diff-within-a-line https   superuser com questions 496415 using-diff-on-a-long-one-line-file  ydiff does it though  see below  ydiff side-by-side word level diff https   github com ymattw ydiff Is this Nirvana  python3 -m pip install --user ydiff diff -u a b   ydiff -s  Outcome   If the lines are too narrow  default 80 columns   fit to screen with  diff -u a b   ydiff -w 0 -s  Contents of the test files  a 1 2 3 4 5 the original line the original line the original line the original line 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 the original line the original line the original line the original line 16 17 18 19 20  b 1 2 3 4 5 the original line teh original line the original line the original line 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 the original line the original line the original line the origlnal line 16 17 18 19 20  ydiff Git integration ydiff integrates with Git without any configuration required  From inside a git repository  instead of git diff  you can do just  ydiff -s  and instead of git log  ydiff -ls  See also  How can I get a side-by-side diff when I do  quot git diff quot   Tested on Ubuntu 16 04  git 2 18 0  ydiff 1 1

User · Answer

I use grc  Generic Colouriser   which allows you to colour the output of a number of commands including diff   It is a python script which can be wrapped around any command  So instead of invoking diff file1 file2  you would invoke grc diff file1 file2 to see colourised output  I have aliased diff to grc diff to make it easier

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Use Vim  diff  path to a  path to b   vim -R -  Or better still  VimDiff  or vim -d  which is shorter to type  will show differences between two  three or four files side-by-side  Examples  vim -d  path to  ab    vimdiff file1 file2 file3 file4

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With bat command   diff file1 file2   bat -l diff

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Actually there seems to be yet another option  which I only noticed recently  when running into the problem described above    git diff --no-index  lt file1 gt   lt file2 gt    output to console instead of opening a pager git --no-pager diff --no-index  lt file1 gt   lt file2 gt    If you have Git around  which you already might be using anyway   then you will be able to use it for comparison  even if the files themselves are not under version control  If not enabled for you by default  then enabling color support here seems to be considerably easier than some of the previously mentioned workarounds

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And for those occasions when a yum install colordiff or an apt-get install colordiff is not an option due to some insane constraint beyond your immediate control  or you re just feeling crazy  you can re-invent the wheel with a line of sed   sed  s  -  x1b 41m-  s     x1b 42m   s     x1b 34m   s    x1b 0m     Throw that in a shell script and pipe unified diff output through it   It makes hunk markers blue and highlights new old filenames and added removed lines in green and red background  respectively 1  And it will make trailing space2 changes more readily apparent than colordiff can     1 Incidentally  the reason for highlighting the filenames the same as the modified lines is that to correctly differentiate between the filenames and the modified lines requires properly parsing the diff format  which is not something to tackle with a regex   Highlighting them the same works  well enough  visually and makes the problem trivial   That said  there are some interesting subtleties   2 But not trailing tabs   Apparently tabs don t get their background set  at least in my xterm   It does make tab vs space changes stand out a bit though

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for me i found some solutions  it is a working solution        echo off     title a game for youtube  explorer  quot https   thepythoncoding blogspot com 2020 11 how-to-echo-with-different-colors-in html quot      SETLOCAL EnableDelayedExpansion     for  F  quot tokens 1 2 delims   quot    a in    quot prompt   H  E   amp  echo on  amp  for   b in  1  do rem quot    do         set  quot DEL   a quot            echo say the name of the colors  don t read          call  ColorText 0a  quot blue quot      call  ColorText 0C  quot green quot      call  ColorText 0b  quot red quot      echo      call  ColorText 19  quot yellow quot       call  ColorText 2F  quot black quot      call  ColorText 4e  quot white quot           goto  Beginoffile           ColorText     echo off      lt nul set  p  quot    DEL  quot   gt   quot   2 quot      findstr  v  a  1  R  quot    quot   quot   2 quot  nul     del  quot   2 quot   gt  nul 2 gt  amp 1     goto  eof           Beginoffile

User · Answer

Since wdiff accepts args specifying the string at the beginning and end of both insertions and deletions  you can use ANSI color sequences as those strings   wdiff -n -w    033 30 41m  -x    033 0m  -y    033 30 42m  -z    033 0m  file1 file2   For example  this is the output of comparing two CSV files     Example from https   www gnu org software wdiff manual html node wdiff-Examples html

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Coloured  word-level diff ouput  Here s what you can do with the the below script and diff-highlight        bin sh -eu    Use diff-highlight to show word-level differences  diff -U3 --minimal          sed  s  -  x1b 1 31m-  s     x1b 1 32m   s     x1b 1 34m   s    x1b 0m       diff-highlight    Credit to  retracile s answer for the sed highlighting

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I would suggest you to give diff-so-fancy a try  I use it during my work and it sure seems great as of now  It comes packed with many options and it s really easy to configure your diffs the way you want   You can install it by   sudo npm install -g diff-so-fancy   or on Mac   brew install diff-so-fancy   Afterwards  you can highlight your diffs like this   diff -u file1 file2   diff-so-fancy

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Here is another solution that invokes sed to insert the appropriate ANSI escape sequences for colors to show the    -  and   lines in red  green  and cyan  respectively   diff -u old new   sed  s  -   tput setaf 1  amp    s      tput setaf 2  amp    s      tput setaf 6  amp    s     tput sgr0      Unlike the other solutions to this question  this solution does not spell out the ANSI escape sequences explicitly  Instead  it invokes the tput setaf and tput sgr0 commands to generate the ANSI escape sequences to set an appropriate color and reset terminal attributes  respectively   To see the available colors for each argument to tput setaf  use this command   for i in  0  255   do tput setaf  i  printf  4d  i  done  tput sgr0  echo   Here is how the output looks     Here is the evidence that the tput setaf and tput sgr0 commands generate the appropriate ANSI escape sequences     tput setaf 1   xxd -g1 00000000  1b 5b 33 31 6d                                     31m       tput setaf 2   xxd -g1 00000000  1b 5b 33 32 6d                                     32m       tput setaf 6   xxd -g1 00000000  1b 5b 33 36 6d                                     36m       tput sgr0   xxd -g1 00000000  1b 28 42 1b 5b 6d                                  B  m

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Character-level color diff  Install ccdiff  ccdiff -r  usr share dict words  tmp new-dict

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You can change the subversion config to use colordiff     subversion config diff       Set diff-cmd to the absolute path of your  diff  program         This will override the compile-time default  which is to use        Subversion s internal diff implementation  -  diff-cmd   diff program  diff  gdiff  etc    diff-cmd   colordiff   via  https   gist github com westonruter 846524

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Man pages for diff suggest no solution for colorization from within itself  Please consider using colordiff  It s a wrapper around diff that produces the same output as diff  except that it augments the output using colored syntax highlighting to increase readability   diff old new   colordiff   or just   colordiff old new     Installation    Ubuntu Debian  sudo apt-get install colordiff OS X  brew install colordiff or port install colordiff

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On recent versions of git on Ubuntu  you can enable diff-highlighting with   sudo ln -s  usr share doc git contrib diff-highlight diff-highlight  usr local bin sudo chmod a x  usr share doc git contrib diff-highlight diff-highlight   And then adding this to your  gitconfig    pager      log   diff-highlight   less     show   diff-highlight   less     diff   diff-highlight   less   It s possible the script is located somewhere else in other distros  you can use locate diff-highlight to find out where

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