colordiff: put some color in your diffs
January 9th, 2008 edited by Patrick MurenaArticle submitted by arno. We are running out of articles! Please help DPOTD and submit good articles about software you like!
colordiff is a small tool to colorize diff output which greatly improves readability.
colordiff can be used as a wrapper around diff, a tool used to compare files line by line. Simply run:
$ colordiff file1 file2
That will output differences between file1 and file2 in a colored way. You can also pass diff options to colordiff. So, to output a colored difference between two directories, you can run:
$ colordiff -Nur dir1 dir2
colordiff can also be used through a pipe. Just give it some diff content on its input and it will output the same content with colors.
$ cat some_patch_file | colordiff
Or:
$ cvs diff | colordiff
colordiff even works with wdiff since version 1.0.7 (currently only in Debian unstable, not in Ubuntu).
Default colors are very clean on a dark terminal: blue for new text, red for old text, magenta for other diff stuff. You can also modify them easily if you wish. Because colordiff has no way to determine if it writes on a dark or on a light terminal, default colors may be quite harsh on a white terminal. So, colordiff comes with colordiffrc-lightbg file, a configuration example for light backgrounds.
Related tools
Many text editors can display differences with two or more files. Graphical tool xxdiff can display differences between two or three files (it also has more features).
If you like to colorize everything on the console, you may like ccze to colorize log files, colormake to colorize make output, colorgcc to colorize gcc output, or highlight (with --ansi option) to colorize source code for more than 100 languages.
Tips
diff alias
Colordiff can be used anywhere diff is used. So, you may want to set colordiff as an alias for diff. Put in your shell configuration file:
alias diff=colordiff
svndiff function
If you use version control regularly, it may be useful to define a diff wrapper in your ~/.bashrc, ~/.zshrc, or other shell configuration file. For example, here is my svndiff function:
svndiff () { svn diff "${@}" | colordiff | less -R -E }
So, I can run svndiff in a directory controlled by svn, and get very readable differences information. You can find a cvsdiff function in colordiff manual, or write one for your favorite control version.
Screenshots
You can find some screenshots on colordiff site:
http://colordiff.sourceforge.net/screenshots.html
colordiff is available in Debian from oldstable Sarge to unstable Sid and for Ubuntu from Dapper to Gutsy.
January 9th, 2008 at 2:12 pm
In bash you’ll need to add a semicolon at the end of the compound statement.
Also the -E option for less is optional.
svndiff () { svn diff “${@}” | colordiff | less -R; }
January 9th, 2008 at 3:03 pm
Another way to integrate to subversion is to update the diff-cmd in .subversion/config. This can be a shell script. Mine now looks like:
/usr/bin/colordiff -wb “$@”
January 9th, 2008 at 9:10 pm
By far the gnicest diff tool on Debian systems these days is “meld”.
Never leave home without it.
January 9th, 2008 at 9:16 pm
I prefer using Vim for my diff coloring:
$ diff a b | vim -
January 9th, 2008 at 9:31 pm
Ditto on meld - it is ‘the’ tool for diffing and fixing files.
January 10th, 2008 at 1:14 pm
@salty-horse:
Instead of
$ diff a b | vim -
I use
$ diff a b | view -
Like this I don’t have to add the “!” for leaving vi :).
January 11th, 2008 at 5:02 pm
Also don’t forget the colored diff extension for thunderbird… really useful
http://code.google.com/p/colorediffs/
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/addon/4268
January 11th, 2008 at 6:44 pm
Instead of :
$ diff a b | vim -
I prefer to use :
$ vimdiff a b
which allows you to copy diff hunks between both files.
Very nice!
March 20th, 2008 at 9:26 pm
I think you should use Subversion config file for use colordiff as a diff program instead of alias svn diff.
For example:
alikus@hostalikus:~$ cat ~/.subversion/config
…
[helpers]
diff-cmd = colordiff
…