How to see git changes after moving code around?

Question

I am looking at a git diff, most of it is the same code moved from one file to another plus whitespace. How could I see the real differences? I tried git diff -b -C -C to no avail.

Answer 1

I came across this via a comment in another SO post, but it seems that since git v2.15 there is the ability to use git diff --color-moved to better differentiate between moved and changed code.

There is a nice example + screenshot showing it's usage on the GitHub git 2.17 release blog post too.

You can find the help/usage for it at https://git-scm.com/docs/git-diff#Documentation/git-diff.txt---color-movedltmodegt

Related options include:

• --color-moved[=<mode>] (modes: no, default, plain, blocks, zebra, dimmed-zebra)
• --no-color-moved
• --color-moved-ws[=<modes>] (modes: no, ignore-space-at-eol, ignore-space-change, ignore-all-space, allow-indentation-change)
• --no-color-moved-ws