How do I pipe in FileMerge as a diff tool with git on OS X?

Question

I'm new to git on OS X, and I'm using it via the command line. I come from the world of Tortoise SVN and Beyond Compare on Windows.

I want to be able to send diffs to FileMerge.

I was able to do this with TextMate simply by using:

git diff | mate 

But I'm not sure how to get that set up so I can use FileMerge instead?

Answer 1

Although it's not exactly the same as piping stdin into a script, you can do this:

git difftool -t opendiff -y 

That will launch FileMerge once for each file. Doing the whole project tree at once takes a little scripting.

See also this question.

Answer 2

Create an executable script git-diff-cmd.sh

#!/bin/bash  xattr -w com.apple.TextEncoding "UTF-8;134217984" "$2" xattr -w com.apple.TextEncoding "UTF-8;134217984" "$5"  /usr/bin/opendiff "$2" "$5" -merge "$1" 

Now edit your .gitconfig file to include the lines

[diff]     external = <path-to>/git-diff-cmd.sh 

...replacing <path-to> by the path to git-diff-cmd.sh. Now git diff will use FileMerge, and correctly display UTF-8 Unicode characters.