[git] Viewing all `git diffs` with vimdiff

I setup git diff to wrap into vimdiff, using "Git Diff with Vimdiff" as a guide, and it's working as expected unless there are many files with changes.

When there are multiple files with changes and I run git diff, it opens the first file and, after quitting the first instance of vimdiff, I'm presented with the following message:

external diff died, stopping at filename

This is a completely different behavior than I am used to. I had a similar setup in the past with SVN and, when diffing against multiple files, I would review the first file, then write and quit using :wq and the next file with differences would open up.

This is not the case with Git. I tried :n[ext], but doing so does not fill the left window with the original file so that it can be diffed against the modified version.

This question is related to git vim diff vimdiff

The answer is


For people who want to use another diff tool not listed in git, say with nvim. here is what I ended up using:

git config --global alias.d difftool -x <tool name>

In my case, I set <tool name> to nvim -d and invoke the diff command with

git d <file>

You can try git difftool, it is designed to do this stuff.

First, you need to config diff tool to vimdiff

git config diff.tool vimdiff

Then, when you want to diff, just use git difftool instead of git diff. It will work as you expect.


Git accepts kdiff3, tkdiff, meld, xxdiff, emerge, vimdiff, gvimdiff, ecmerge,
and opendiff as valid diff tools. You can also set up a custom tool. 

git config --global diff.tool vimdiff
git config --global diff.tool kdiff3
git config --global diff.tool meld
git config --global diff.tool xxdiff
git config --global diff.tool emerge
git config --global diff.tool gvimdiff
git config --global diff.tool ecmerge

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