6/28/13 Vive la git diff!

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By Tim Pettersen, Stash Developer

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On June 27, 2013
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Diff. Patch. Change. Delta. .

Popular Posts
Whatever you call it, diffs are pretty much the aggregate output of any developers day. A
git? tig!
bunch of deletions and additions from a set of files that can be codified in a .patch file as a
bunch of pluses, minuses and context indicators. Deploy Java Apps With Docker =
Awesome

a/todo.md Git Flow Comes to Java

+++ b/todo.md
Meet the Stash Realtime Editor Add-
@@ -1,5 +1,4 @@ on
# TODO
buy anniversary present Git: Automatic Merges With Server
Side Hooks (For The Win!)
build arduino-based vaucansons duck
-blog on git diffs
fork webkit
Popular Tags
plugins 204
Im still undecided as to whether its depressing or amazing that our lifes work can be so simply
encoded. wikis 126

summit 114
Regardless, git has given us a bunch of neat ways at looking at these diffs. The following post is
press releases 109
a quick primer on the various incantations of git diff. Note that Im going to be focusing on
different output format for viewing diffs. Theres also a whole range of ways you can specify plugin 94
different commits and paths to diff, but thats a topic for another day. atlassiantv 93

development tools 83
git diff
wiki 82

Youre probably already familiar with the built in git diffcommand. By default, diff will show video and audio 78
you changes to tracked files in your work tree that havent yet been added to the index. For
buzz 75
example:

$ cat 2cities.txt
Local Blogs
It was the best of times,
it was the blurst of times. Spain Blog

Germany Blog
$ sed -i .tmp s/blurst/worst/ 2cities.txt
Japan Blog
$ git diff
China Blog
It was the best of times,
-it was the blurst of times.
+it was the worst of times.

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6/28/13 Vive la git diff! | Atlassian Blogs

This works fine, but its unfortunate that it shows up as one removed line followed by one added
line. All I did was change one word!

git diff color-words

git diff also has a special mode for highlighting changes with much better granularity: color-
words. This mode tokenizes added and removed lines by whitespace and then diffs those.

$ git diff color-words

It was the best of times,

it was the blurstworst of times.

Thats an improvement! Now were down to the individual words that have changed. But if you
look closely, weve really only changed three characters: blu has become wo. We can do
even better.

git diff-highlight
If you clone the git source youll find a sub-directory called contrib. It contains a bunch of git-
related tools and other interesting bits and pieces that havent yet been promoted to git core.
One of these is a perl script called diff-highlight. diff-highlight pairs up matching lines of diff
output and highlights sub-word fragments that have changed.

$ git diff | ~/src/git/contrib/diff-hightlight/diff-highlight

It was the best of times,

-it was the blurst of times.
+it was the worst of times.

Sweet! Now weve pared down our diff to the smallest possible change.

If you like this fine-grain way of looking at diffs, you can add a shell function alias to
~/.git/configto handle the piping to diff-highlight for you:

1[alias]
2# assumes git.git clone at ~/src/git
3diff-highlight = "!f() { git diff \"$@\" | ~/src/git/contrib/diff-highlight/diff-highlight; }; f"

Then, you can get a nicely highlighted diff by simply invoking git diff-highlight.

Diffing binary files

If you make changes to a binary file (such as an image, pdf or archive) the default output from
git diffis pretty uninteresting.

$ git diff

Binary files a/script.pdf and b/script.pdf differ

However, git does have a nifty feature that allows you to specify a shell command to transform
the content of your binary files into text prior to performing the diff. It does require a little set up
though.

First you need to specify a textconv filter describing how to convert a certain type of binary to
text. Im using a simple utility called pdftohtml (available via homebrew) to convert my PDFs into
human readable HTML. You can set this up for a single repository by editing your .git/config file,
or globally by editing ~/.gitconfig.

.git/config

1[diff "pdfconv"]

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6/28/13 Vive la git diff! | Atlassian Blogs
2textconv=pdftohtml -stdout
Then all you need to do is associate one or more file patterns with our pdfconv filter. You can
do this by creating a .gitattributesfile in the root of your repository.

.gitattributes

1*.pdf diff=pdfconv
Then, the next time we attempt to do a diff of a binary file, we get much more meaningful
output:

$ git diff

<HTML>
<BODY>
Interior. Room filled with monkeys bashing on typewriters. Mr. Burns
tears a sheet of paper from a typewriter.<br>
-Burns: It was the best of times.. it was the blurst of times?<br>
+Burns: It was the best of times.. it was the blurst of times? You
stupid monkey!<br>
Burns balls up the sheet and throws it at the monkey.<br>
</BODY>
</HTML>

And remember, this is just regular diff output, so we can redo our diff-highlighttrick to get
something a bit more palatable:

$ git diff-highlight

Interior. Room filled with monkeys bashing on typewriters. Mr. Burns

tears a sheet of paper from a typewriter.<br>
-Burns: It was the best of times.. it was the blurst of times?<br>
+Burns: It was the best of times.. it was the blurst of times? You
stupid monkey!<br>
Burns balls up the sheet and throws it at the monkey.<br>

The same technique can be applied to get useful diffs from all sorts of binary files, for example:

zips, jars and other archives: using unzip -l (or similar) in place of pdf2htmlwill show you
paths that have been added or removed between commits

images: exiv2 can be used to show metadata changes such as image dimensions

documents: conversion tools exist for transforming .odf, .doc and other document formats
to plain text. In a pinch, strings will often work for binary files where no formal converter
exists.

Want to talk more about git or Atlassian Stash? Leave a comment or hit me up on twitter
@kannonboy

Tags: diff, git

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Comments (3)
By default, diff will show you the difference between unstaged changes to currently
tracked files, and your current HEAD.

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6/28/13 Vive la git diff! | Atlassian Blogs
Nope!

By default, diff compares the files in your working area with the files in the staging area
(aka the index).

To compare the index with HEAD you can say git diff cached.

By Gustavo Chaves on June 27, 2013 / Reply

Good catch Gustavo Ive updated the post. Thanks!

By Tim Pettersen on June 27, 2013

and to show what has been staged: git diff staged

By Daniel S. reichenbach on June 28, 2013 / Reply

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