When I run git diff
, the header part of each diff comes out in white text. Since I'm using a light background it is hard to read, so I want to change it.
I have found that I can change other colors in the diff output like this (in .gitconfig
):
[color "diff"]
old = green
new = red
But I can't figure out what to put there for the header color. Even better, is there someplace where all of the default git config
settings are documented?
By 'diff header' I mean lines like this:
diff --git a/README.md b/README.md
index f102026..c5e3428 100644
--- a/README.md
+++ b/README.md
According to the official Git documentation, git diff is used to: “Show changes between the working tree and the index or a tree, changes between the index and a tree, changes between two trees, changes resulting from a merge, changes between two blob objects, or changes between two files on disk.”
You can run the below commands to compare the changes for specific file: git diff HEAD <file_name> git diff <file_name>
The main difference between the commands is that git diff is specially aimed at comparisons, and it's very powerful at that: It can compare commits, branches, a single file across revisions or branches, etc. On the other hand, git status is specifically for the status of the working tree.
^M represents carriage return. This diff means something removed a Unicode BOM from the beginning of the line and added a CR at the end.
Try setting color.diff.meta
, e.g.
git config --global color.diff.meta blue
or by manually editing the configuration file
[color "diff"] meta = blue
You can look through the various color.
settings in the git-config
reference for more possible settings. The color.diff.meta
setting is listed here:
color.diff.<slot>
Use customized color for diff colorization.<slot>
specifies which part of the patch to use the specified color, and is one ofplain
(context text),meta
(metainformation),frag
(hunk header),func
(function in hunk header),old
(removed lines),new
(added lines),commit
(commit headers), orwhitespace
(highlighting whitespace errors). The values of these variables may be specified as incolor.branch.<slot>
.
A Google search for "git diff change colors" shows this question as the top hit, so let me add the info I came here looking for, now that I've figured it out, knowing others will land here too looking for the same info.
git diff
color options:meta
= header information (white by default), that looks like this:
diff --git a/home/.bashrc b/home/.bashrc index 148212d..a0d16d8 100644 --- a/home/.bashrc +++ b/home/.bashrc
old
= deleted lines (red by default)
new
= added lines (green by default)
Change those colors in your global gitconfig file in ~/.gitconfig like this:
git config --global color.diff.meta blue git config --global color.diff.old blue git config --global color.diff.new blue
or by editing ~/.gitconfig directly and adding these lines:
[color "diff"] meta = blue old = blue new = blue
For more color settings, or "slots" you can change, check the man pages:
man git config
or look online here, and search for color.diff.<slot>
.
See the color section from man git config
, or online here: https://git-scm.com/docs/git-config#Documentation/git-config.txt-color
color
The value for a variable that takes a color is a list of colors (at most two, one for foreground and one for background) and attributes (as many as you want), separated by spaces.
The basic colors accepted are
normal
,black
,red
,green
,yellow
,blue
,magenta
,cyan
andwhite
. The first color given is the foreground; the second is the background. All the basic colors exceptnormal
have a bright variant that can be specified by prefixing the color withbright
, likebrightred
.Colors may also be given as numbers between 0 and 255; these use ANSI 256-color mode (but note that not all terminals may support this). If your terminal supports it, you may also specify 24-bit RGB values as hex, like
#ff0ab3
.The accepted attributes are
bold
,dim
,ul
,blink
,reverse
,italic
, andstrike
(for crossed-out or "strikethrough" letters). The position of any attributes with respect to the colors (before, after, or in between), doesn’t matter. Specific attributes may be turned off by prefixing them withno
orno-
(e.g.,noreverse
,no-ul
, etc).An empty color string produces no color effect at all. This can be used to avoid coloring specific elements without disabling color entirely.
For git’s pre-defined color slots, the attributes are meant to be reset at the beginning of each item in the colored output. So setting
color.decorate.branch
toblack
will paint that branch name in a plainblack
, even if the previous thing on the same output line (e.g. opening parenthesis before the list of branch names inlog --decorate
output) is set to be painted withbold
or some other attribute. However, custom log formats may do more complicated and layered coloring, and the negated forms may be useful there.
Here's a more complex example. The first color is the foreground color, the 2nd color is the background color, and any words thereafter are attributes. See the man
ual pages quoted above for details.
Run these commands:
git config --global color.diff.meta "blue" git config --global color.diff.old "black red strike" git config --global color.diff.new "black green italic" git config --global color.diff.context "yellow bold"
OR copy/paste the following into the bottom of your ~/.gitconfig file:
[color "diff"] meta = blue old = black red strike new = black green italic context = yellow bold # context (ie: unchanged lines) text
Here's some sample output of git diffn
(git diff
with line numbers) with these settings. Notice the red strikethrough text for deleted lines. Pretty cool. I didn't know this was possible until today (not that I like these colors though--I think the default is best :)).
Also notice that the colons are NOT colored or stylized to match the surrounding text on the left and right. This is intentional and designed-in behavior to act as a visual separator between the line numbers added on the left and the original git diff
output on the right.
"diff-so-fancy strives to make your diffs human readable instead of machine readable. This helps improve code quality and helps you spot defects faster."
If you love us? You can donate to us via Paypal or buy me a coffee so we can maintain and grow! Thank you!
Donate Us With