Colored, side by side, inline git diff output in my terminal

Question

Please note this question is not a duplicate of, but a followup to the question "How can I get a side-by-side diff when I do “git diff”?". This question seeks new information and the solution to a problem.

Also, please note that I am seeking only solutions whose output is inline in the terminal like the default git diff is -- I don't want anything which opens an external gui diff program.

Progress so far

I have followed the suggestion from the SO question linked above and put the following executable on my path:

#!/bin/bash

# side-by-side diff with custom options:
sdiff -w200 -l "$2" "$5" 

I can then test it like so, for example:

GIT_EXTERNAL_DIFF=mydiff git diff HEAD HEAD~1

and I'll get output like this:

The Problem

As intended, this is:

• inline in the terminal
• side by side output

However, it has a couple problems:

• If more than one file has changed, it dies after processing the first file, outputting the error fatal: external diff died, stopping at <filename>
• The output doesn't use green/red colors to show new code / deletions.

Is there a way to remedy those two issues with sdiff? If not, is there a way to do it with /usr/bin/diff, the built in git diff program, or another terminal program? I don't care how I accomplish the goal. I just want inline, side by side diffs with color.

Answer 1

[THIS] worked fine for me, even with colors. (Thanks @ github.com/cockroachdb/cockroach)

If your terminal has issues displaying colors with sdiff, you probably want to pipe sdiff to colordiff like:

sdiff -w200 -l "$2" "$5" | colordiff | grep -E ...